40 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



circumstances. What attraction, wliat stimulus could sucli a 

 state of things offer to their gifted natures ? To minds already 

 fired by aspirations after a new world of thought, what conge- 

 niality could be found in society of this kind, where, notwith- 

 standing the boast of high cultivation, Lessing was stigmatised 

 as an- innovator and a free-thinker ? 



There were but few, and those the disciples of Lessing and 

 Kant, by whom the oriflamme of a higher intellectual life was 

 unfurled ; among these were Engel, Biester, Sack, Teller, 

 Spalding, Meier-Otto, Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Mar- 

 cus Herz, and Zollner, and a peculiar charm was lent to this 

 circle from the presence of those gifted women by whom the 

 tone of thought was powerfully influenced. Among these dis- 

 tinguished ladies may be mentioned the two daughters of 

 Mendelssohn, the romantic enthusiast Dorothea Schlegel, and 

 her sister Henrietta Mendelssohn, to whom in later years was 

 entrusted the education of the unfortunate Duchesse de Praslin 

 Fraulein von Briest, afterwards Frau von Eochow, and subse- 

 quently Madame de Fouque Henriette Herz, the friend of 

 Schleiermacher and the two Humboldts, her sister Brenna,, 

 and the Sibyl Eahel, who was distinguished for peculiar mental 

 acuteness and a subtilty of intellect worthy of Aristotle. 



The brilliant circle that in after years gathered round Eahel, 

 and formed an historical element in the intellectual society of 

 Berlin, found its prototype in the select assemblage meeting at 

 the house of the Jewish physician Marcus Herz, first attracted 

 there by a course of lectures, on physics and philosophy,, 

 which he, an ardent disciple of Kant, had commenced at the 

 advanced age of eighty years. The lectures on physics were 

 exceedingly popular from the admirable experiments, re- 

 markably elaborate for that time, with which they were illus- 

 trated. 



It was through these lectures that, in the year 1785, William 

 and Alexander von Humboldt first made the acquaintance of 

 Herz and his household, and this acquaintance was further 

 matured during several interviews that took place in reference 

 to the erection of a lightning-conductor at Tegel, an appli- 

 ance not yet in general use at Berlin. 1 



1 The first lightning-conductors used in Berlin were erected in 1777, 

 on the Royal Arsenal and on the barracks of the Pfuel Regiment at the 



