previous next

[125] was a vivacity and freshness about many parts of it that made me feel as if it were partly taken from life, he confessed that he had intended the character of the old pastor for a portrait of his wife's father, Boier.

When we entered his parlor again, I was struck with the picture of a beautiful lady. On asking whose likeness it was, the tears started to his eyes, and he imperfectly articulated, ‘The Countess Stolberg’; and afterwards he added, more composedly, ‘She was an angel; one whom I loved more than any human being, except my wife.’ So fresh and faithful are his feelings in his old age to the memory of that extraordinary and unfortunate woman, who has been dead nearly thirty years

Promising to return to supper, I went to see Creuzer, author of the ‘Symbolik,’ etc. He is now, I should think, about fifty,—a man apparently of a strong, decided character, and perhaps not very amiable. I found him pleasant in conversation, and much disposed to tell something of the much he knows; fond of anecdotes, particularly if they were a little scandalous; and in general a man, who, though so deep in his books, still enjoys society. I drank tea with him, in company with Wilken, who is just going to Berlin, and two or three others of the Heidelberg people, who, I thought, were more sociable, talkative, and inquisitive than the professors of the North are,—and then I walked back to the good old Voss, who lives in a beautiful retired situation just outside of the town. It was nearly eight o'clock, and supper was punctually on the table; no one was present except his wife, towards whom his manners were marked by a tenderness which, if it had not been so patriarchal, would have approached to gallantry; and she, though old and beginning to be feeble, discovered a kind of attention to him, . . . . which showed how deep was her affection. . . . . It was a supper of Roman simplicity, nothing but a perch from the Neckar and an omelette. . . . . The conversation was almost entirely of his early friends, of whom the world has since heard so much,—of Holtz, whose life he has written so well; of Leopold Stolberg, for whom, in spite of changes and errors, he seems to have lost none of his regard; and, clarum et venerabile nomen, of Klopstock, with whom he was intimate. Of the last he told me that, after visiting him in 1789, at Hamburg, Klopstock walked with him a mile out of the city, and when they parted, told him, as their conversation had been political, with a kind of prophetic emphasis which left an indelible impression on Voss's mind, ‘The troubles now breaking out in France are the beginnings of a European war between the patricians and the plebeians. I see generations ’


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Hamburg (Hamburg, Germany) (1)
France (France) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
J. H. Voss (2)
F. G. Klopstock (2)
Wilken (1)
Leopold Stolberg (1)
Countess Stolberg (1)
Holtz (1)
G. F. Creuzer (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1789 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: