George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[260] Paris. Julius is going on vigorously with his translation at Hamburg, assisted, as he writes me, by notes from Wolf of Vienna and Huber of Berlin, and expecting to publish at New Year. Tieck writes with much kindness about it. Villemain has volunteered to me a message of approbation and thanks; and I enclose you a letter from Humboldt, found in a newspaper, of which I know nothing else, not even to whom it was addressed; but which I think you and Don Domingo del Monte will read with pleasure, for the sake of the few words in which he speaks of Prescott and myself, and for the broad view he gives—after his grand, generalizing fashion—of the progress of culture in the United States.

There have been a great many notices of my History, I understand, in England and this country, which I have not seen; but I have not heard of any of them that were unfavorable.

¹

From Ludwig Tieck

Potsdam, July 28, 1850.

honored friend,²—What a happy time it was when we met almost every day in Dresden. I still look back to that time with much pleasure. Genuine friendship, indeed, consists in this, that men understand each other better every day, and become indispensable to one another in sentiments, expressions, and so forth; this is what ordinary society neither appreciates nor requires. Notwithstanding the high esteem with which you inspired me, your valued present surprised me; for, delightful as these welcome volumes were, their many-sided and profound learning astonished me. Much is now doing for Spanish literature, but your learned work appears to me the first of the day.

If I did not immediately thank you from a full heart, my malady, which takes hold of me, and exhausts me to an incredible degree, must be my excuse, and, on the same ground, you will kindly accept this dictated letter.

Much as I have read of Spanish, and though I counted myself among the connoisseurs in the province of poetry, your beautiful book