294 Humboldt's Letters. 



leo. 



VARNHAGEN TO HUMBOLDT. 



BERLIN, July 8th, 1854. 



WITH emotions of gratitude I received the dear letter 

 of your Excellency. Yet a sign of life, indeed, a sign of 

 the most vigorous life ! "Whenever the question could 

 arise how you felt and thought in this gloomy time, such 

 a sheet would be the most decided answer, the most 

 brilliant testimony, to a sentiment and activity which 

 always kept on in the same direction, and never proved 

 false. The letter from London the epithet "unkempt" 

 is singularly happy. I send back dutifully, as directed ; 

 how I should have liked to incorporate it with my collec- 

 tions ! It is a remarkable sign of the present situation ; 

 many expressions in it strikingly significant. Had the 

 writer but expressed himself thus before his last perso- 

 nal experience ! The scientific renown which you 

 believe in danger from the threatening deluge of writings 

 seems to me to have stood from the first upon unsafe 

 ground, upheld by external props, with which it must 

 fall inevitably. Perhaps a political career will be open 

 to him again, but certainly not through literary aid, 

 for which, in part, this sudden literary taste seems 



