YALE AND EUROPE-1850-1857 39 



"Jefferson and Slavery," which, having been at a later 

 period refused by the "New Englander," at New Haven, 

 on account of its too pronounced sympathy with democ- 

 racy against federalism, was published by the "Atlantic 

 Monthly, " and led to some acquaintances of value to me 

 afterward. 



Keturning from St. Petersburg, I was matriculated at 

 the University of Berlin, and entered the family of a 

 very scholarly gymnasial professor, where nothing but 

 German was spoken. During this stay at the Prussian 

 capital, in the years 1855 and 1856, I heard the lectures of 

 Lepsius, on Egyptology; August Boeckh, on the History 

 of Greece ; Friedrich von Raumer, on the History of Italy ; 

 Hirsch, on Modern History in general; and Carl Bitter, 

 on Physical Geography. The lectures of Ranke, the most 

 eminent of German historians, I could not follow. He had 

 a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject, as to slide 

 down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, 

 and then, with his eye fastened on the tip of it, to go 

 mumbling through a kind of rhapsody, which most of my 

 German fellow-students confessed they could not under- 

 stand. It was a comical sight: half a dozen students 

 crowding around his desk, listening as priests might listen 

 to the sibyl on her tripod, the other students being 

 scattered through the room, in various stages of discour- 

 agement. My studies at this period were mainly in the 

 direction of history, though with considerable reading on 

 art and literature. Valuable and interesting to me at this 

 time were the representations of the best dramas of Goethe, 

 Schiller, Lessing, and Gutzkow, at the Berlin theaters. 

 Then, too, really began my education in Shakspere, and 

 the representations of his plays (in Schlegel and Tieck's 

 version) were, on the whole, the most satisfactory I have 

 ever known. I thus heard plays of Shakspere which, in 

 English-speaking countries, are never presented, and, 

 even into those better known, wonderful light was at times 

 thrown from this new point of view. 



As to music, the Berlin Opera was then at the height 



