ht and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we
do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that
Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in
this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less
cost to the reader.

Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of
Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal
German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He
became in time Heyne's pupil at Goettingen, and very early showed the
qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness
after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and
ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of
religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the
cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the
excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme
interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then
received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished
man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are
seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary
records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were
distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we
have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--

Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Goettingen]. Heyne
received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in
himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable
activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit
entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and
maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet
greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was
too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of
mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more
distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he
established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of
him and will not perish--the one, the tribut