ry one in Berlin wondered at the intimate
companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a
brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his
reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists.
This Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and
indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and
placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for
himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he
squandered his money on childish trifles; and, for example, one day
bought six thousand thalers' worth of walking-sticks. This poor man,
who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a
great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of
Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for
walking-sticks--this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel's most
confidential society; he was the philosopher's bosom friend, his
Pylades, and accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally
witty and gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain this
phenomenon, by maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich
Beer. I now believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy
consisted in this--Hegel was convinced that no word of what he said
was understood by Heinrich Beer; and he could therefore, in his
presence, give himself up to all the intellectual outpourings of the
moment. In general, Hegel's conversation was a sort of monologue,
sighed forth by starts in a noiseless voice; the odd roughness of his
expressions often struck me, and many of them have remained in my
memory. One beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the
window, and I, a young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good
dinner and finished my coffee, spoke with enthusiasm of the stars,
and called them the habitations of the departed. But the master
muttered to himself, 'The stars! hum! hum! The stars are only a
brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens.' 'For God's sake,' I
cried, 'is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is
rewarded after death?' But he, staring at me with his pale eyes,
said, cuttingly, 'So you want a bonus for having taken care of your
sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?' At
these words he looked anxiously rou