158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it "would not give back the measure of the depth, and that no frame 

 could inclose the infinity of the object. Having once come out from 

 Heyne's philological school, and still, when sixty years old, with the 

 college portfolios under his arm, taking his place in our audience-rooms 

 among Boeckh's students, he was the man to lay the bridge between 

 the old and the new time, between the philological-historical, aesthetic- 

 speculative Germany, as the turn of the century saw it, and the mathe- 

 matico-scientific, technical, inductive Germany of our days. 



The German people, indeed the world_, has remembered his loving, 

 enthusiastic devotion. Not the thousands of well-observed, important, 

 and new facts with which he has enriched single branches ; not the 

 happy and suggestive thoughts thrown out as seed-corns and sometimes 

 grown up to new sciences ; still less his historical and geographical 

 works composed with ceaseless industry — furnish the reasons why he 

 sits out there in a marble image. The composition of the whole world 

 into an artistically harmonious figure attempted by him, the combina- 

 tion of the ideal with the real realized in him, of the poet with the 

 naturalist, made him, in Emerson's sense, a representative man of sci- 

 ence, and educated manhood in that statue has set up Alexander von 

 Humboldt as a personification of a new phase of its own genius, of 

 which it became conscious through him. 



The custom of honoring the memory of a great man by a monu- 

 ment would have little significance if the monument had no other pur- 

 pose than to keep up that memory ; for, if the remembrance would 

 be lost without the monument, it would not be worth keeping up. The 

 monument should rather, calling back to thought the hero who has 

 gone out from among us, lead us, in reflecting on his virtues, to renew 

 the determination to emulate them. We should ask ourselves how the 

 man to whom we look up in grateful admiration would judge us if he 

 should return to us, and whether he would recognize us as worthy 

 prosecutors of the work he had begun. 



Alexander von Humboldt died in a gloomy time. The reign of a 

 king friendly to the muses, to whom he had personally stood closer 

 than it is often allowed to a subject to stand, had fallen short of ful- 

 filling expectations. The rule of Napoleon HI, personally hateful to 

 him, a friend of the house of Orleans, weighed upon France. A new 

 and strong hand had taken the reins of Prussian state life ; but it was 

 sad to close his eyes at the instant when even to us a momentous de- 

 cision seemed unavoidable. 



With how deep satisfaction Humboldt would now see the imperial 

 banners waving from the palace of the prince regent, and how the 

 revolution in the fortune of the Fatherland, which we have witnessed 

 since his death, would gratify him ! But how deeply would it pain 

 him to learn at what price the recovered power of the German Em- 

 pire had to be bought ! — that instead of the feeling of mutual esteem 

 and friendship which during his life had bound Germany and France, 



