Journal.
Gottingen,
March 26, 1817.—Yesterday I went round and took leave of all my acquaintances and friends.
From many I did not separate without a feeling of deep and bitter regret, which I never thought to have suffered on leaving
Gottingen.
From
Eichhorn, whose open-hearted kindness has always been ready to assist me; from
Dissen, whose daily intercourse and conversation have so much instructed me; from the Sartorius family, where I have been partly at home, because there is more domestic feeling and happiness there than anywhere else in
Gottingen, and where the children wept on bidding me good by; from
Schultze, whose failing health will not permit me to hope to receive even happy news from him; . . . . and above all from
Blumenbach,
ante alios omnes praestantissimus, but whose health and faculties begin to feel the heavy hand of age,—from all these and from many others I separated myself with a regret which made my departure from
Gottingen this morning an hour of sadness and depression.
At
Cassel I stopped a few hours, and
Prof. Welcker, who makes part of my journey with me, carried me to see Volkel,—a man who has made himself rather famous by a treatise on the
Olympian Jupiter, and by a little volume, published 1808, on the plundering
Greece of its works of art, just at the time
Bonaparte had taken everything of this kind from
Germany to
Paris. . . . . On returning to our lodgings, I took leave of
Everett and
Stephen Perkins, who had accompanied me thus far, and in the evening came on a few English miles to an ordinary inn.
