WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
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 33: 31. HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
By Alexander von Humboldt
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

31.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.

Berlin, October 4th, 1837.

You delight sometimes in arresting fleeting events, and in preserving what the winds usually carry away. I therefore send you, dear friend, the little speech, which the papers have published in such a mutilated form. The sense of it will please you, although its neglected style might be better. Political Hanover I found, as you supposed; and private conversations with King Ernest, which at the same time express wrath and fear, confirm the view. Leist of Stade with his report, which lasted five hours, has lately done harm by his flattery.

Yours,
A. Ht.

Stieglitz, Wilhelm’s oldest friend, and who once saved his life in the Leine river (my brother cried out to him, with unexampled stoicism; “I die, but it does not matter,”) was to me a serious apparition of a ghost. The effect of his spirit upon me is uncomfortable.