e tribute to
his memory will be but a faint acknowledgment.

Of Neander's outward history there is but little to be reported; his life
was the retired and uneventful one of a peculiarly intense and abstracted
student. It is hardly a figure of speech, but almost exactly the literal
truth to say that he was born, and lived, and died, beneath the shadow of
the Universities. He was not, indeed, quite so much of a recluse as his
fellow-countryman Kant, the renowned Koenigsberg philosopher, who, though
he reached the age of eighty, and had a reputation which filled all
Europe, was never more than thirty-two miles away from the spot where his
mother rocked him in his cradle. But considering the ampler means at his
command, and the greatly increased facilities for travelling, Neander's
neglect of locomotion is nearly as much to be wondered at as Kant's; I
doubt if he was ever beyond the boundaries of Germany.

He was born January 16th, 1789, in Goettingen, a city of some eleven
thousand inhabitants in the kingdom of Hanover, the seat of a famous
University, which, though now less prominent than formerly, has numbered
amongst its professors such men as Blumenbach, Eichhorn, and Michaelis.
His parents were of Jewish blood and the Jewish religion, and he inherited
from them, in a strong degree, both the peculiar physiognomy and the
distinguishing faith of that despised but most remarkable race. Nor was he
a Jew only outwardly; from the beginning he was marked as an Israelite
indeed, a true Nathanael soul.

At an early period in his life, his father having suffered reverses and
been reduced to poverty, he removed with his parents to Hamburg, a
commercial city on the Elbe, and one of the four free municipalities of
Germany. In the Hamburg gymnasium, corresponding in rank with our American
academies, though prescribing a wider range of studies, he received his
first public instruction. It is related of him, that he used frequently to
steal into one of the book-stores, and for hours together sit buried in
some rare and erudite volume. And here the original bent of his genius was
early developed; subtlety, profoundness, and intense subjectivity of
thought were noticed as the distinguishing characteristics of his mind. In
a letter from Neumann to Chamisso, bearing date February 11th, 1806, when,
of course, he was only seventeen years old, it is said of him: "Plato is
his idol, and his perpetual watchword. He pores over that author nigh