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Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt cover

Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. / From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen's diaries, and letters of Varnhagen and others to Humboldt

Chapter 30: 28. HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
By Alexander von Humboldt
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Essays, Letters & SpeechesGerman LiteratureHistory - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

A curated correspondence collects letters from Alexander von Humboldt to his friend and confidant Varnhagen von Ense, supplemented by diary excerpts and letters from other contemporaries. The missives blend personal friendship with professional exchange, discussing scientific observations, lectures, manuscripts, travels, and reactions to peers and events. Editorial apparatus preserves original phrasing and provides contextual notes and extracts that illuminate relationships and chronology. The selection highlights the writer’s methods of observation, precise descriptive habits, and modes of intellectual collaboration. Together the documents form a compact portrait of an engaged scholar whose private reflections and public endeavors intersect across a wide range of topics.

28.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Wednesday, May 17th, 1837.

You have prepared for me, my highly esteemed friend, a delightful pleasure. I hope that these remarks upon the composition of history will hereafter form a part of your miscellaneous writings! The mind certainly becomes dizzy in contemplating the abundance of material which springs copiously from every fresh source. You point out how this material may be moulded by a man of genius. In the approaching millennium everything will be simplified—the individual life of nations is preserved, in spite of warlike expeditions over continents. Since the great epoch of Columbus and Gama, who made one part, one side of this planet known to the other, that fluctuating element, the ocean, has established the omnipresence of one kind of civilization (that of Western Europe). Its influence breaks through the rigid barriers of continents, and establishes new customs, new faith, new wants of life even in the most unorganised parts of the earth. The South Sea Islands are already Protestant parishes;—a floating battery, a single vessel of war, changes the fate of Chili....

Princess Helene, by her charming grace and intellectual superiority, also yesterday made many conquests over the raw and obstinate material which had opposed her. It was ludicrous to see how some persons tried to appear serious, dignified, and—silly. That she leaves in good spirits for her new country, I am much rejoiced. Would that she passed the Rhine with less retinue! Her mother is good and refined, but of retired habits; but some other members of her suite had better remain on this side of the river. Fortunately, people in the great French world are entirely free from the paltry gossip and fault-finding that rule in Berlin and Potsdam, where they subsist for months, in thoughtlessness, upon the self-created phantasy of a weak imagination.

I made Privy Councillor Mueller, who knows how to estimate you and your genius, participate in my joy. But he also, as a jurist, strayed away to the first sheet, No. 63 (Criticisms on the Provincial Law, by Goetze). Will you not, dear friend, send me, for Mueller, the commencement of that criticism?

Most gratefully yours,
A. v. Humboldt.