183 



CXXXIII. 



HUMBOLDT TO YARNHAGEN. 



Berlin, 11th March, 1847. 



I have been more virtuous than you give me credit 

 for, my dear friend. I have quite done with the 

 first volume of the " Letters"* (Theresa's property). I 

 have scarcely found anything to alter, and on the 

 whole, have, suppressed at the outside as much as 

 would fill three to four pages bread and butter affairs, 

 domestic details, a few attacks of Madame Diede on 

 Duke Charles of Brunswick, who would be sure to take 

 his revenge by slandering her virtue. There is in 

 them much that is beautiful, both as regards language 

 and thought : a life-picture of the very rarest kind 

 an utter disregard of all human happiness and unhap- 

 piness, in so far as it does not tend to narrow the 

 range of ideas much that is biblical and doctrinal in 

 Christianity a medley of stoicism, and contempt of 

 the events of the day and yet, with all that, much 

 of delicacy and tenderness in a correspondence which 

 was continued to within four days of his death, written 

 011 lines, to enable the trembling hand to write at all. 



Occasionally, lovers' squabbles, qui mimpatientent, 



* Charlotte Diede, the daughter of a country parson, had become acquainted 

 with Wilhelm Humboldt, when a young man, at Pyrmont. Referring to this 

 fugitive acquaintance, and to a passage he there had written in her album, 

 she, many years after, addressed herself to Humboldt, when he was a 

 minister, on the subject of her own unfortunate circumstances. Hence arose 

 the famous correspondence known as " Wilhelm von Humboldt' s Letters to a 

 Friend ;" also translated into English, and alluded to in the above letter of 

 A. v. Humboldt to Varnhagen. The manuscript of these letters of W. 

 v. Humboldt was left as a legacy by Charlotte Diede to Therese vim 

 Bacheracht, a well-known German novelist. TK. 



