vast areas of snow sometimes move down the mountain-sides, wrecking every thing in their way, and often proving fatal to the unfortunate living beings whom it may overtake. Scarcely a year passes that does not record a number of deaths from this cause.

I have seen the waters of Phoenix Lake rise six feet, and then rapidly subside, when one of these vast bodies of snow has plunged into it from the steep sides of Old-Man Mountain.

During the month of March, 1866, there was a snow-storm in the Sierra of seventeen days' duration. Day after day, for a week, I shovelled the snow from my doorway, in the vain hope that the storm would soon cease. When it did cease, my cabin-the extreme height of which was twelve feet-was entirely covered with snow, in such a way that I was obliged to cut a hole in the roof, and shovel a passage through in order to obtain light, air, and an entrance

way.

The mountains were visited by a still severer storm in February, 1867. One of the county-papers, in speaking of it, stated: "The snow in some places lies thirty feet deep, and a two-story house on the Plaza of Meadow Lake is entirely out of sight. The average depth of the snow is twenty-one feet, and drifts form to a depth of twenty feet in a single night." This storm continued for thirty days.

The atmosphere of the mountains is dry, and seldom intensely cold, but the winters are very long, commencing in

the latter part of November, and fairly terminating about the first of July. Be it in any season, I know of no climate so eminently calculated to benefit sufferers from bronchial or pulmonary difficulties; and of all climates which I have had the good fortune to visit, I know of none more beautiful than the Sierra Nevada spring and summer. In the former season, though the ground be covered with snow, the sun is warm and invigorating, while the great pine wilderness echoes with countless birdsongs.

Right through this temple of Nature, this region of grandeur and snow, the great enterprise pushes itself for a distance of sixty miles or more; now plunging into a ravine, shadowed and darkened by the rocky heaps which rise thousands of feet above it, now stretching off on the open plain, and guarded on either side by huge, gaunt pines, which stand stiff and listless by the way.

Lounging upon the steps of the rudely-finished but comfortable house known as Polley's Station, at Crystal Lake, we can hear the clear, ringing sound of hammer and drill; now and then a thundering blast rolls away, echoing up and down the great valleys. This is the steady, onward march of civilization, breaking the pathway through forests, and mountains, and solid granite, for the most magnificent enterprise which has prompted mankind for centuries past-the Pacific Railroad.

BARON

LOOKED at from one point of view, these two thick volumes contain the record of a life that was a tragedy. Yet few biographies narrate the story of a career so uninterruptedly fortunate in externals. Bunsen's life began under a thatched roof, but it was passed in the splendid society of scholars and statesmen, of cardinals and kings. He lived to within one year of the allotted term of human life, and through that long period he enjoyed the most splendid health and unquenchable good spirits, enabling him to work to an extent remarkable even in Germany, that land of intellectual bees and beavers. He married at an early age the woman he loved, and his wedded life was an undisturbed course of happiness, surrounded as he was by a family of nine intelligent, affectionate children, and sustained by the devotion and appreciating sympathy of his excellent English wife. He enjoyed, to a degree rarely experienced by a subject, the intimate personal friendship of three kings of his own country, the present king of Prussia, William I., his brother and predecessor, Frederic William IV., and their father, Frederic William III.; and in the family of Queen Victoria his position was more like that of an elder brother, than that of Minister of Prussia. On one occasion, when he was absent from Prussia, Frederic William IV. issued these extraordinary words: "I hunger and thirst after Bunsen," and in asking him to Berlin, in 1857, to be present at the Mecting of the Members of the Evangelical Alliance, he ended his letter with these words: "You surely will not refuse to be the guest of an old friend in his own house?" and when the king, on entering the hall, saw Bunsen, he came straight up to him, embraced him once, and then again, saying aloud, "I thank you from my heart, dear Bunsen, that you have fulfilled my request and come so quickly-God reward you!" No wonder that, as Humboldt afterward told

A Memoir of Baron Bunsen, late Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary of his Majesty Frederic William IV., at the Court of St. James. Drawn chiefly from family papers, by his widow, Frances Baroness Bunsen. In two volumes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. London: Longmans & Co. 1868.

BUNSEN.*

*

Bunsen, the scene was observed with astonishment. In 1846 he writes, "I was invited to Windsor Castle to spend the birthday of the Prince of Wales for the first time, as it is not usual with the Queen to have foreign guests on that occasion. * I had brought with me German books for the children. * * The Prince wanted to have the pictures explained, and I sat on the floor in the midst of the group; we all spoke German," etc. These volumes are full of similar evidences of the affectionate familiarity that existed between Bunsen and persons of high station, and not only with such persons, but with men distinguished in literature, in science, in art, and in politics. Truly has his widow written of him: "Wherever his lot had been cast,-whether in his native fatherland, or in his beautiful Italy, or in that no less beloved England, the fatherland of his wife, there he attracted all with whom he came into contact by his sympathy and benevolence, by the brilliancy of his wonderful mind, no less than by the depth of his genuine humility." And yet, in spite of all this outward prosperity, Bunsen's life reads like a tragedy; for, what hope that he lived for was fulfilled? what dream of his youth was accomplished? and what substantial result remains as the fruit of this life, passed in more than Herculean labors? If we look at the vast extent of his personal influence; at the good his example did; at the moral effect of his pure and manly life, with its perpetual sacrifice of inclination to duty and its neverdampened enthusiasm for truth, with his unconquerable belief in the future triumph of the right; we must, perhaps, allow that a life of which these are the striking traits, cannot rightly be called a tragedy. It is only when we ask for the outward material results of such splendid opportunities; for the proofs which future time will demand of this man's right to influence his age and to be remembered, that our feeling, on closing these volumes, is explained. He resided in Rome during twenty-two years, and during nearly the whole of that time he was in the service of Prussia; yet, politically, his diplomatical labors were of no advantage to either Prussia or Rome; and if it ought not to be said that

he was recalled in disgrace, it must at all events be admitted that his recall was looked upon as such by a large party in Prussia, and by the Government of Rome. Only "the express will of the king interfered to prevent disgrace and mortification being added in order to give bitterness to the unavoidable fall." A message reached him at Trieste from the CardinalSecretary of State to let him know confidentially that the Pope would not receive him, though he was not to be officially informed of this determination. The reader will find in these volumes sufficient material to form an opinion as to the merits of the questions at issue between Prussia and Rome, which led to this final rupture: it is not our purpose to give here the details of the dispute nor to judge how far Bunsen was to blame for the turn affairs took; all we wish to show is, that these twenty-two years-the best part of life, from the age of twenty-five to forty-sevenwere virtually thrown away in this half-political existence, for which he was so ill suited, and for which the result proved him so unfit. None of his schemes, at least none that were of national importance, came to any thing; of all his political labors he reaped nothing but disappointment and the hatred of the dominant parties in both countries; and the only material intellectual result of his studies in the Eternal City was a single book, "The Description of Rome," a work which he had no desire to write, but in which he became entangled by his earnest wish to help a needy friend, and which during eleven years -from 1818 to 1829-proved a most serious embarrassment and impediment to progress in his own favorite pursuits. This was the beginning, and the end was like the beginning. He was born with a wonderful love and aptitude for study, but the greater part of his life was passed, not in study, but in the performance of political duties--ministerial, diplomatic, and advisory-for which he had neither love nor aptitude, and which resulted in a series of melancholy failures. And it may even be doubted if his studies, far-reaching and unwearied as they were, have given to the world any books or any discoveries of any enduring value. Truly, it seems as if Bunsen's epitaph should be that which is so falsely written on the tomb of Keats: "Here lies one whose name is writ on water."

Great is the temptation to give a full account of Bunsen's long and active life, and to extract from these two crowded volumes many pages of their overflowing wealth of anecdote and insight into public affairs. But

our space forbids any such indulgence, and we shall think ourselves fortunate if we can give our readers any sufficient notion of their general contents.

Christian Carl Josias Bunsen was born in Corbach, in the principality of Waldeck, on the 25th of August, 1791. He was, as his biographer naïvely remarks, "the child of parents advanced in life, who had married (in 1790) for the sake of companionship and mutual care in old age, and probably little anticipated such blessing upon their union." The mother died in 1819, the father in 1820; both parents living to see their son established in life and on the high road to distinction and honor. The father appears to have been a man of character, energetic, decided, and conscientious, and with a strong desire to give his son all the advantages of education that he perceived him so well fitted to improve. He stinted himself in order to lay up money to meet the expenses of his son's university education, and by dint of hard work and strict economy, he had laid aside a hundred thalers, which, when added to the fifth part of the yearly stipend allowed by the Government of Waldeck-for Bunsen had to share this allowance of fifty thalers with five fellowstudents!-enabled Bunsen to enter the University of Marburg, where, however, he remained only a year, finding it too small for the opportunities he needed. Singularly enough, the mother of Bunsen seems to have left but little trace upon the life of her son. At her death he speaks of her with filial affection, but nothing indicates that, spiritually or intellectually, he was under any special obligations to her. His half-sister Christiana— for Bunsen's mother was his father's second wife seems to have exercised the strongest moral influence upon him of all with whom he came in contact in his earlier years. She was a woman of most marked and independent character, and the story of her life is one full of romantic details. But we have no space to more than allude to it here. In 1809 Bunsen left Marburg for Göttingen, where Heyne, "full of years and of honor, received and treated him with paternal kindness, perceiving from the first that he had to do with a student of uncommon gifts and acquirements." Bunsen was at this time eighteen years of age. Heyne seems to have exercised a strong and healthful influence over his mind, and a few allusions to him in the scanty records of this most interesting period of our subject's life explain the secret of that influ ence in the similarity of character and habit

of mind of the scholar and his master. In 1813 Bunsen writes to his friend Agricola, from Göttingen :

Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place. 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 bim. 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. Consider what it was to have guided the studies, influenced the mental cultivation of two generations, during half a century!—and, what is more, to have estimated and rated at its just value a far higher condition of intellectual development with a measure of insight and devotedness just the reverse of what was attributed to him by the narrowness of opinion founded only on the casual and insignifi

cant utterances of his mind. And what has he established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?

It was in February, 1810, that Bunsen was recommended by Heyne as teacher of the German language to our countryman Mr. William B. Astor, and thus commenced an acquaintance that soon ripened into a friendship which was never broken, and which led to important results in Bunsen's education. First, it insured his independent position at the University, and Mr. Astor took so much pleasure in the society of his young teacher that he afterward sought his companionship in his travels through Germany and, still later, in Italy. On their return he invited Bunsen to Paris, and then to Rome, but in accepting this last invitation he got no further than Florence, for on meeting his friend there he was informed that his father had suddenly recalled him to America; and the two young men parted not to meet again for forty-one years. Mr. Astor warmly urged upon his friend to accompany him to America; but Bunsen, whose mind was at that time absorbed in oriental studies, begun in Paris, and pursued there with his all-devouring German zeal, could not be persuaded to think of any new plans until his scheme of visiting India and there studying the parent language and the parent civilization on its native ground had been carried out. This second visit to Italy was made in 1816, and his long residence there may thus be said to have been begun

by what looks like an accident, although Bunsen, with his peculiar and most deeply, earnestly held views of Providence, would never have looked upon it in that light. It was while he was travelling to Florence to meet Mr. Astor

that he was placed in momentary embarrassment by his resemblance to Napoleon I. and his family, at one of the stopping-places of the Diligence between Lyons and Marseilles. He was called out by the police from the table d'hôte, where he sat with his companion of the Diligence, and subjected to close examination as a supposed Napoléonide, having, in spite of prohibition, crossed the frontier from Germany: the testimony, however, of all his fellow-travellers to his having occupied a place in the Diligence in their company all the way from Paris, and of one of them that he had seen him at Paris, was finally admitted to be satisfactory.

After Mr. Astor's departure he remained for some time in Florence awaiting the arrival of Niebuhr, whom he had met in Berlin the previous year, and with whom he had entered at once into relations of deep intellectual sympathy. He writes to Lücke on the occasion of his first meeting with the historian:

It would be hard to describe my astonishment at his command over the entire domain of knowledge. All that can be known seems to be within his grasp, and every thing known to him to be at hand, as if held by a thread. And, later, to Agricola, from Florence:

You must imagine what I feel, in wandering with Niebuhr over the ruins of the ancient, pre-Roman, Etruscan magnificence, and then again among the splendid monuments of the destroyed liberty of the modern Athens, the city of Dante and Machiavelli. What can be more venerable and affecting than the melancholy, the mourning of a great man over the human race? (Bunsen alludes here to Niebuhr's constitutional hopelessness and despair over the problem of human life in history and in the present.) It is like the Divine Spirit in human form, beholding with human sadness the vain rushing of the generations of men towards an abyss; or like Prometheus witnessing and deploring from his rock the gradual extinction of the sparks he had kindled. And with all this wide grasp of contemplation, what a clear and single eye has Niebuhr for every thing individual, what a certainty in his knowledge of fact; in a word, what inward

completeness!

While in Florence, Bunsen supported himself by giving instruction in French to an English gentleman by the name of Cathcart, who, like Mr. Astor, and, indeed, like every

one who came into intimate relations with him, had been strongly drawn to him, and was never wearied with exploring the curiosities of Florence, and afterward of Rome, in his company. We must pass rapidly over the long period of Bunsen's residence in Rome. He went thither partly by the advice of Niebuhr, who encouraged him to hope for assistance from the Prussian Government in the prosecution of his studies, but he was enabled

to go there, in the first place, by the employment furnished him by his pupil, Mr. Cathcart, who continued his studies for some time longer under Bunsen's direction. Shortly after his arrival, he became acquainted with the family of his future wife, Miss Waddington, who with her father and mother and two sisters were living in Rome. In February, 1817, he writes to his favorite sister Christiana, and tells her of this new acquaintance; in April he informs her that he is in love, and on the 1st of July he was married. From this time Bunsen's private and domestic happiness was uninterrupted, except by the death of one child who was taken away in infancy, and late in his life by the miserable accident that crippled in a moment his daughter Matida. In a life of seventy-nine years there are few men who have so few afflictions to mourn

over. In November of the same year, 1817, Brandis, Niebuhr's assistant in the Legation, being obliged to return to Prussia, Bunsen offered to fill his place, and thus began his long diplomatic career which ended only six years before his death, in 1860. We wish we had space here to quote the beautiful prayer found in his journal, and written there at the beginning of his life in Rome. It will be found at page 120 of vol. i., but, like much that is of the highest interest in this book, we can only refer to it at this time. We must, however, make room for an extract from a letter to Brandis, in which he takes leave as it were of the favorite branch of study of his University days" the last instance, or nearly so, of studying in learned leisure. Soon after this date, the task-work on the 'Description of Rome' drew him more and more into a vortex; and when once free from this, the subjects of his life's meditation engrossed all the powers and time not claimed by his

tendency with respect to Athens. . . . When one comes to be better acquainted with the aristocracy of Athens, the cruelty and insolence of their conduct, the absence of all counteraction of democracy, except by the steady oppression of an oligarchy, and to discover their panegyrists to consist of fools or rascals, or at best of coxcombs, like Xenophon,-then one understands that there was no alternative between a democracy, such as Demosthenes craved, purified by a return to simplicity of life, strengthened by warlike exercises, and by the dismissal of corrupt orators and magistrates, and the admission of Alcibiades as tyrannos.

And then follows an admirably clear statement of the position of Plato in relation to his times, showing a power of insight that it is greatly to be wished had been applied to the writing of history, but which, alas, we are not often to meet with in the field into which circumstances now drive Bunsen. His life in Rome had, at the beginning, a little leisure, and much enjoyment, although the former was soon swallowed up in the increas ing duties of his position. During Niebuhr's

absence, in 1823, he was advanced to the post of Chargé d'Affaires; then, during a visit to Berlin, in 1828, he was made Privy Counsellor of Legation, and continued in charge of the embassy, as Resident Minister,

until his recall in 1838.

Among the events full of interest to Bunsen and his wife in these days, were the creations of Thorwaldsen's genius which abounded in the years 1820, '21, and '22. Once they were fortunate enough to find him . . . in the act of adding the last touches to the clay in which he had modelled his statue of Mercury. He dilated then upon the course of sensations and images, rather than of reflection which had brought him to fix upon the position of a sitting figure in perfect repose, but in an evidently animated promptitude for action, as upon a subject to which he would delight in giving shape, if he could find a situation to furnish it with a full, and intelligible, and satisfactory meaning. "And then," he said, "I hit upon Mercury, who, having played on the Pan-pipe to subdue Argus into slumber, at the instant of observing that his purpose has been accomplished, is removing the musical instrument from his lips (which are thus not hidden nor disfigured), and with the right hand is grasping the sword's hilt, but, still, motionless, is watching lest the eyes should open again." The conception of Christian art was foreign to the mind of Thorwaldsen, and only in compliance with the wishes of his native Sovereigy did he steel his courage to the attempt after having failed in accomplishing for the King of Bavaria a group of the