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HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



social standing, will grieve with you for the rare woman with 

 whom none can compare among all the German women of the 

 day for this beneficent life that spent its treasures on all sides 

 with such generosity. Only those, however, who were privileged, 

 like ourselves, to live in long intimacy with your ever memorable 

 parents and their family only those can fully realize what and 

 how much you have lost in your mother, as so lately by your 

 father's death. In comparison with such a loss all words of 

 comfort are cold and trite. There is but one thing left, to resign 

 ourselves to the inevitable, and to cherish those who are torn 

 from our eyes the more closely in the perpetual inner com- 

 munion r/, the spiritual vision/ 



On November 17, 1901, the youngest son, Fritz, ended his 

 life of sorrow in Heidelberg, at the age of 33, after spending the 

 last years in quiet retirement on his little property in Baden. 

 True friends stood round his coffin in the Hospital at Heidelberg, 

 deeply moved at the contemplation of all that had befallen the 

 House of Helmholtz. 



And thus we part from the Mighty Dead, and from his works, 

 which amaze us by the depth and universality of their ideas 

 and arouse our admiration as works of art, and which sprang 

 from a noble and truly moral intellect. We feel ourselves in 

 the grip of the emotions which Helmholtz himself expressed so 

 grandly in his tribute to Goethe and Beethoven : in words 

 which may as justly be applied to himself, and to his creations of 

 pure reason and aesthetic criticism, as to the great poet and 

 musician : 



' We venerate in him a genius, a spark of the divine creative 

 energy, transcending the limits of our rational and self-conscious 

 thought. And yet the artist is a man as we are, in him the 

 same intellectual forces are at work as in ourselves, save that 

 their aim is purer and more enlightened, and their balance is 

 less disturbed : and in proportion as we comprehend the 

 language of the artist more or less perfectly and completely, we 

 feel that we have in ourselves some share of the forces that 

 have brought forth such marvels/ 



Oxford : Printed at the Clarendon Press by HORACE HART, M.A. 



