FROM REVOLUTION OF JULY TO DEATH OF THE KING. 233 



royal family, has stood so near our revered sovereign as your 

 Excellency. If the king has ever felt drawn to anyone as a 

 friend, it has been to yourself. We, who are all devoted to 

 your Excellency, regard you as the chief mourner. I deeply 

 deplore that a bond at once so rare and so beautiful should 

 have been severed.' We repeat it. Humboldt on his own ac- 

 count must have desired the continuance of this connection, 

 and its severance was at the time a source of pain. There is 

 no reason to doubt the sincerity of his feelings when, upon 

 June 24, 1840, he expressed to Gauss the grief into which he 

 had been plunged by the death of a monarch who had long- 

 accorded to him his confidence, without at any time curtailing 

 his independence of mind. The same feeling is still more 

 evident in a letter to Casimir Gride, towards whom he had 

 certainly no inducement to act the hypocrite : l ' You will no. 

 doubt have learned from the papers the cause of my sorrow and 

 of my long silence. I should have been guilty of great ingrati- 

 tude had I not been deeply affected by the loss of a sovereign 

 endowed with many high moral qualities and distinguished as 

 a monarch by honesty of purpose, who, while loading me with 

 kindness, has ever accorded me complete independence of 

 opinion, and has respected my attachment to friends with 

 whose sentiments he could not but be at variance.' In these 

 simple lines Humboldt has raised a memorial to his sovereign 

 far more worthy of the friend he mourned and of his own 

 heart than is to be found in the extravagant expressions, 

 composed for effect, with which he concluded his speech de- 

 livered before the Academy of Sciences a few days before the 

 death of Frederick William III., at the ceremony of laying the 

 foundation stone of the monument of Frederick the Great : 

 ' The Academy, founded by Leibnitz, and consolidated by Frede- 

 rick the Great, looks back to the period of its institution 

 through the softening mists of distance, with emotion similar 

 to that inspired by the nineteenth century, in which a beloved 

 monarch is magnanimously engaged upon founding throughout 

 his enlarged dominions institutions for the cultivation of 



1 De la Roquette, vol. ii., 'Avertissement des nouveaux diteurs.' p. v. 

 The date 'June 3 ' is manifestly false; it ought probably to be 'July.' 



