RESIDENCE AT BERLIN TO THE REVOLUTION OF JULY. 105 



rant, and untutored, as at Berlin, nor so determined that it 

 should be so. All knowledge of any other life, opinion, or 

 effort was wilfully and obstinately put aside ; and, with con- 

 temptible pride, the courtiers strove to live in rigorous isola- 

 tion, in ignorance even of the world that lay immediately 

 around them. They never seemed to suspect how much they 

 lowered themselves and lessened their influence by such con- 

 duct, nor how greatly it exposed them to future calumny and 

 contempt. The peevish irritability produced in Humboldt by 

 his transcendent mental and social qualities was rarely vented 

 against the person of his sovereign, though he exceedingly 

 lamented that terrible ennui from which the king suffered, and 

 which all society was powerless to relieve ; whoever might be 

 present, no free conversation, no unrestricted intercourse could 

 take place, and Humboldt readily saw that in such a circle 

 there could be no opportunity for the exercise of any profound 

 or intellectual faculty. The king, moreover, had no wish to be 

 entertained by conversation, scarcely would he yield to the 

 distraction of lively narratives when new, pointless, and not 

 too long. From the numerous stories still current, everyone 

 is familiar with the utter helplessness of Frederick William III. 

 in conversation that ' grace of embarrassment,' as it has been 

 happily termed, 1 which to some extent always gave a gene to 

 his society, and which must have been intolerably irksome to 

 Humboldt, accustomed as he had been to the lively flow of 

 conversation in Parisian circles. 



The king, however, was never weary of loading him with 

 tokens of the most flattering confidence. He begged him to 

 consider it as a matter of course that he would always be 

 welcome at midday or evening, whenever he chose to come. 2 

 When Bunsen visited Berlin in the autumn of 1827, Hum- 

 boldt was appointed to act as his guide, and both were favoured 

 with many marks of distinction from Frederick William III.; 3 

 they were admitted by the king into the privacy of his family 

 circle, amid the patriarchal simplicity in which he lived in the 



1 Holtei, < Vierzig Jahre,' vol. iii. p. 268. 



2 Varnhagen, ' Blatter,' vol. v. p. 76. 



3 Bunsen, vol. i. pp. 285, 304, &c. 



