Be good enough to return the ghost story, by all means.
NOTE BY VARNHAGEN TO HUMBOLDT’S LETTER OF APRIL 26TH, 1855.—A “stranger
is emboldened to transmit words of power to the spirit.” “They are
given to her with the order to repeat them.” In case Humboldt should
answer, he is requested to send the letter with the chiffre A. W.,
to the store on the left of the house, at No. 120 Linden Street, and
receive further details. A wanderer is described as sitting down to
rest. Brother Wilhelm appears to brother Alexander and exhorts him
to think of the kingdom of heaven, and how splendid it is up there,
how misty on earth. As a token of identity, he reminds him of the
eighteenth warm birth-day, “where they swore to love each other,” an
oath which reaches beyond the portals of death, and which he now
fulfils. It is a bombastic farrago, frequently repeating the word
“finish,” which strikes the reader as eminently inappropriate.
Of the above-named direction Humboldt observes: “That it is the
boarding-school of Frau von Wenkstern and Widow Poppe.”
168.
HUMBOLDT TO VARNHAGEN.
BERLIN, _August 9th, 1855_.
I had already heard with sorrow from the gifted Princess von
Wittgenstein, that you, noble friend, suffered more than usually.
Receive me with indulgence on Saturday, about 10 o’clock, in spite of my
long absence, and of my inconvenient trilogy, Berlin, Tegel, and
Potsdam. I shall then also bring you a few lines of thanks to your
cousin, the Imperial Brazilian Chargé d’Affaires in Madrid. His history,
founded upon archival monuments, seems to become of great importance;
but what a strange missive without adding the first pages, and notes
also without a beginning.[75] I doubt of my ever catching those
commencements in my cosmic disorder. As I spent almost an hour alone
with the Prince of Prussia yesterday, I shall be able to tell you
something not uninteresting, although not at all decisive. The Prince,
whom I take to be veracious, assures me of having always asserted,
faithful to his principles, that war would probably have been avoided,
if Prussia and Austria had from the first co-operated actively with the
Western powers against Russia. They answered in St. Petersburg that the
Emperor would not have yielded, but this the Prince doubted....
With old attachment, yours,
A. V. HUMBOLDT.