from the affectionate sympathy of this record, and the keen criticism of his opponents. Here we are permitted to follow all the personal disappointments, to see the bitter struggles of his loyal and religious soul; but his political history, his place among the statesmen, is still unindicated.

The family to which Bunsen belonged would seem to have dwelt at Corbach, in Waldeck, for centuries. Three ears of corn in their escutcheon indicate the condition of agriculturists. His father had, by a first wife, two daughters, - Christiana and Helen. In his old age, he married the gouvernante of the Countess of Waldeck, Johannette Eleonore Brocken, a woman held in high esteem at the palace of Bergheim, but who gave to her child no impression of motherly tenderness. Upon his early years, the strongest influence was exerted by his sister Christiana, a person of a certain unlovely strength and integrity of character, in whom practical skill probably challenged the allegiance of the purely ideal child. At the age of thirteen, he began to save his pennies to buy books. He was the best French scholar in his school; but it is noted as peculiar, that he never could be taught to sing or dance. His prodigious powers of work betrayed themselves at school, where an essay of forty-one pages written in one week, and the fair transcript of sixty, to help his overtasked father, on one Sunday, astonished all his companions. At one of the examinations, the counsellor asked to have Schiller's poem of "The Bell" declaimed on the following day; and Bunsen committed it in time. His passionate love of books extended to a sort of intimacy with the bookbinder, and even then he began to talk of India, a name that his brightest companions only knew as they saw it on the map. At Marburg and at Göttingen his presence was a blessing, for he knew how to apply the right stimulus to all sorts of professors. He met them without dissimulation, and his brilliant intelligence piqued them to their very best! At Göttingen, at the age of twenty-one, he obtained the prize for his celebrated essay on the "Athenian Law of Inheritance." The event, which almost intoxicated his friends with delight, did not interrupt the usual hours of

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his daily work. At this age he was said to resemble in a striking manner the portrait of the first Napoleon now hanging in the town-house at Brügge, -a likeness which occasioned personal inconvenience when he went to Paris in 1816.

Four likenesses of Bunsen adorn these volumes. First comes the bust by Wolff, executed in 1827, at the age of thirty-six. It is not wanting in dignity. The head seems but partially developed, and the likeness to Napoleon can be traced. Then come the portrait by Richmond, and the bust by Behnes, both taken in his fifty-sixth year. The portrait by Richmond, which seems to be a favorite with his family, tested by comparison with the others, reminds us of the idealized portraits of Rowse in this country, in which the idealization frequently passes to the point of caricature; and we see not our friend, but our friend's moment of exaltation, unnaturally, and therefore offensively, protracted. This portrait might well stand for that of Harold Skimpole, and the name will suggest to the reader the precise point of caricature; while it is remarkable, that Behnes' bust, executed in the same year, is the only likeness of him which gives the impression of age. Thirteen years later, when Bunsen was at the age of sixtynine, Roeting gives us at Bonn a portrait unequalled for dignity and power. In this picture, as in that of Goethe, the brain is dominant; suffering has imposed reflection and selfrestraint, while it has neither dimmed the sweetness, depressed the aspiration, nor diminished the hope.

Great was the spite entertained against him, throughout his life; for, although a parvenu and a commoner, he made kings his intimates, and his demeanor was that of a man who crouched before no one. His education had more than exhausted his father's slender means; but the intimacy of Schulze, Lücke, Lachman, and Reck showed that this appropriation had been wisely made. In 1820, he found himself an orphan. It is customary in German universities to encourage students to preach, even when they have not decided to follow the Church; and the satisfaction given by Bunsen's one sermon made it matter of regret when he left Marburg. It was an

act of great moral courage to resign his fellowship, and go to Göttingen, without visible support, in search of a necessary stimulus. One can hardly tell whether to admire most the brave clairvoyance of the boy, or the steady trust of the father, who, being a man that would have demanded unquestioning obedience from the child, granted hearty consent now to the apparently wilful decision of the youth. Heyne, the leading classical scholar in Germany at that time, was professor at Göttingen, and he knew how to value the student. "Poor and lonely did I arrive," wrote Bunsen, "but Heyne guided, encouraged, stimulated me;" and what was more, he put him in the way of getting pupils, so that Bunsen soon found the way to earn his own bread. Here, too, he formed an intimacy with William B. Astor, of New York, whose excellent accommodations he shared as his German tutor. His habits of early rising-he had always been waked by his father at three in the morning gave him the advantage of undisturbed morning hours. Mr. Astor had already prepared to entice him to America. "Be not alarmed," he writes: "to America I shall not go, so long as a Germany exists." "When I met Bunsen," wrote more than one student of that day, "my happy time began."-"It was so unusual," wrote Abeken, "that one whom I could love and honor should advance to meet me!"

In 1814, while on a journey to seek his sister in Holland, Bunsen was delighted by the happy purchase of some Oriental manuscripts, over which he rejoiced with infantine exultation. "Building Stones" was the title of a philological paper written by him at this period. How significant of the true character of a man who never was known to accumulate loose pebbles and drift, but always stored away well-chiselled material! It was Brandis who persuaded Bunsen at this time to go with him to Copenhagen, to pursue the study of the. Northern tongues. Subsequently, when Brandis went as a private lecturer to Berlin, at the suggestion of Niebuhr, Bunsen went with him. This led to Brandis being made Secretary of Legation when Niebuhr was sent to Rome; and Bunsen followed, quite ignorant that in that spot he was to have a

happy home for twenty-two years. Astor had left Göttingen in 1814, promising to return in two years, a promise faithfully kept.

In his last year at Göttingen, Bunsen created some sensation by going indignantly out of a lecture-room, where he conceived sacred things to be discoursed of in an unworthy spirit, an act the more noticeable, as he was supposed to sympathize in the views themselves, and to object merely to the spirit in which they were given out. It was customary in Bunsen's life to hear him spoken of as a man who turned with fascinating and brilliant indecision from one object of interest to another; but perhaps no man ever held to his aim with more tenacity than he. The points laid down in a "plan of study" which he presented to Niebuhr at Berlin in 1816, were steadily held in view until the hour of his death in 1860. A visit of Mr. Astor to Italy opened to Bunsen an opportunity, which he eagerly seized, to pursue his Persian studies. His marvellous philological power was manifested by the manner in which he instantly took his place in a class with men who had been eight and ten years at work, studying, as he expressed it, with "fury and delight." At Rome, without money, prospects, or consolidated plans, his future immediately opened. About this time he began to show an affectionate interest in Italy and America, and to indicate the precise position of Germany in the work of human progress. He was one of those fortunate men who carry in their presence the evidences of their power; and so we are not surprised to find him in April, 1817, the favorite guest of a distinguished English family in Rome, who introduce him to the Duchess of Devonshire, and with whose oldest daughter he soon confesses he has "been for eight days a little in love." The moment he discovered this, he withdrew from the intercourse which had already become precious; but there was at that moment one woman in Rome who knew how to value the real happiness of her daughter beyond a fixed income or an achieved sucWhen Mr. Waddington turned to Niebuhr for advice, the Prussian Minister replied, "Had I a daughter myself,

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I would gladly give her to him. His talents, ability and character are a capital most safely to be reckoned on." In less than three months, Bunsen was married. "Great happiness," he writes, "is hard for a man to bear and to deserve." During his first months of married life, he carried on his Bible studies, encouraged in this work by the intelligent perplexities of the young girl he had married. On the 31st of October, he was regularly inducted into diplomatic life under Niebuhr, and celebrated at his own suggestion and in his own way the tercentenary of the Protestant Reformation. "The Italians are angry," he wrote; "which, however, matters not. May our grandchildren in 1917 celebrate their jubilee in Rome, and in a church!" His exceeding happiness had only one effect, to make him feel more and more that he must do some great work. His first "Christmas tree," brought with it the slander that he was imitating Popish practices. The date of December, 1817, is interesting, because under it he makes his first distinct utterance concerning his latest work in life, a work to which all others were subservient, and towards which the intelligent observer of his life must feel that even his great work on Egypt was only one protracted study. "The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in and through that consciousness he has accomplished, especially in language and religion, this was from the earliest time before my mind," he writes in a letter to his sister Christiana. It is in the same letter that he speaks thus of the chief disappointment of his earlier life, the failure of a purpose he had cherished of travelling in India: —

"And now nothing was ever so certain to me, in my life, as that the journey to India, had I been able to accomplish it, would have caused me to miss my main point: not that the journey would have been without use of itself, but I should have been crushed by the load that it would have brought upon me, and, in the means to my great end, the end would not have been reached."

The character of his sister Christiana must not be passed over in estimating the forces which moulded him. She had