Humboldt's Letters. 23 



HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN. 



BERLIN, July 9A, 1830. 



PLEASE accept for yourself and your highminded 

 and excellent lady my sincerest thanks for your new 

 present, so agreeable to me.* I was not personally 

 acquainted with the man whose eccentricities you have 

 so aesthetically described. He was one of those who 

 shine by their personal appearance ; their lives are of 

 greater effect than their writings. A man who boasts 

 that his recollections go back to the first year of his 

 life (how differently the Margravine judged things, 

 when she says : " J'etais un enfant tres precoce a 

 deux ans je savais parler, a trois ans je marchais !") ; a 

 man who owns a guardian angel in a black cloak, like 

 Cardanus who makes love to old maids, without being 

 drunk, only in order to convert the same to virtue and 

 reading ; a man, to whom the fate of German profes- 



* Memoirs of John Benjamin Ehrhard, Philosopher and Physician. 

 Edited by Varnhagen von Ense. Stuttgart and Tubingen. Cotta. 

 1830. 



