330 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



was somewhat crippled. His custom was to throw on paper an 

 outline, as it were, of the principal topics of conversation ideas, 

 witticisms, quotations, allusions, and exclamations ; while he 

 failed to add the flowing diction by which the whole should be 

 connected. It seems as if, as soon as he sat down to write, a 

 feeling of constraint and formality passed over him ; of the 

 freedom and elegaiace of expression so remarkable in his con- 

 versation there is scarcely a trace. The construction of his 

 sentences is remarkably clumsy ; ideas as they occur to him are 

 hastily introduced by means of inelegant participles into the 

 overladen sentence : he once facetiously commented on a phrase 

 of this kind by writing on the margin : ' A sentence like a 

 Warsaw dressing-gown, with forty pockets of parentheses ! ' 

 His letters possess mostly a double nature, and resemble a 

 centaur, only in the inverse order, for the first half goes upon 

 horseback prancing upon high sounding epithets, while the 

 latter half walks in the most prosaic manner, as if the writer's 

 power had suddenly become exhausted. Nevertheless, it is not 

 to be supposed that his letters are not worth reading; they bear 

 without doubt the impression of a great and remarkable mind, 

 but unfortunately, from the unyielding nature of the material, 

 the impress is neither accurate nor beautiful. 



To a mind like Humboldt's there is no doubt that the French 

 language offered a material of a more suitable character for 

 the reception of his ideas. It is not to be supposed that all 

 Frenchmen would go so far with the editors of the second 

 volume of De la Koquette's correspondence, in their recognition 

 of the French tone of mind characterising Humboldt, as to 

 sympathise with the exclamation : ' Never indeed was there 

 a mind more truly French, more overflowing with generous 

 sentiments, and delicate satire ; ' l but as a writer he would 

 be classed with French authors with less hesitation even than 

 Frederick the Gbreat ; his books of travel were placed side 

 by side with those of Lamartine and Chateaubriand, while 

 his scientific works were classed with those of Arago and his 

 associates. Humboldt himself confesses that the descriptions 

 of nature by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre proved to him a more 



1 De la Iloquette, vol. ii. f Avert, des nouveaux e Jiteurs/ p. ii. 



