or that degree of public usefulness to which in an hour of genuine enthusiasm they one and all vowed to aspire. “Right royal in all his ways,” as a poet has fitly described him, he sympathized with the favourite pursuits of each, wrestled with all, made them to love each other, and held high among them the ideals of youth and of science. It was quite a day of rejoicing in Göttingen when Bunsen had
won the university prize essay of the year 1812 by a treatise on the Athenian Law of Inheritance, and again a few months later when the university of Jena granted him, unsolicited, the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy.The time had now come for Mr Astor to travel. Bunsen had seen little of the world before then. Only one journey had he made, but that one was to Weimar, and in company with Arthur Schopenhauer, one of his Göttingen acquaintances, a man of genius, whose fate it has been to live unknown and to become after death not famous only, but the founder of a numerous and turbulent school of metaphysicians. Bunsen was introduced to Goethe, and bore away the impress of the society that assembled around the great poet. In 1813, a journey was undertaken to South Germany, during which Mr Astor was well pleased to see his friend revelling in the company of choice spirits at each centre of intellect, and shared in his exultation over the crushing blow that had fallen upon Napoleon at Leipsic. Some months later they separated at Göttingen, Astor to return to New York, with an understanding that they would meet for further travel two years later, and Bunsen to resume his studies which had lost nothing of their vast range. It seemed to Bunsen a purpose not exceeding the limits of a man's life to comprehend the history of all Teutonic races in religion, laws, language, and literature. That was the heroic age of comparative philology; and thus we see Bunsen, who had read Hebrew when a boy, plunging into Arabic at Munich, Persian at Leyden, and Norse at Copenhagen, as opportunities offered for each.
At the close of 1815 Bunsen found his way to Berlin, to lay before Niebuhr the historian what was then already a many years plan of learned inquiry. This step led to important consequences in the life of Bunsen. Niebuhr not only approved of the Titanic scheme, and hoped that Prussia, in which all the hope of Germans then began to be centred, would in time find money for assisting it, but so powerful an impression did he receive on that occasion, that when they met again two years later, Niebuhr, having meanwhile become Prussian envoy to the Papal court, exerted all his influence to draw Bunsen into official life. Of the two intervening years it will suffice to relate that they had been spent by Bunsen in assiduous labour among the libraries and collections of Paris and Florence, whither the hope of meeting his former pupil, Mr Astor, had led him; and that he contracted during his stay in the capital of France a love for the peculiar graces of French genius which never left him through life.
Fascinated by the condescending friendship of Niebuhr, by the glories of Rome, and also by the charms of English society, Bunsen continued his stay in that city. In July 1817 he married Miss Waddington, eldest daughter and co-heiress of Mr B. Waddington of Llanover, Monmouthshire. Even then his purposes in life remained purely scientific. Little did he dream that the Eternal City was to become his home for twenty-one years, or that one of the most difficult problems of European diplomacy would there be entrusted to his hands.
When Niebuhr obtained the consent of his Government for the appointment of Bunsen as secretary of the Roman embassy, negotiations were being actively carried on between Berlin and Rome for a new establishment of the Papal Church in the Prussian dominions. This had become necessary, since 1815, by the addition of several millions of Catholics to the population of that mainly Protestant country, of which they now formed no less than two-fifths. An agreement was the fruit of these labours, by which the king of Prussia allowed the publication within his dominions of a Papal bull (called De salute animarum), circumscribing the Catholic dioceses, and determining the position of the Romanist hierarchy. During this period of initiation into the mysteries of Papal statecraft, Bunsen had occasion to learn that the Vatican began, under the fostering care of the Jesuit order, to revive from the inanition into which the French Revolution and its effects had thrown it. So universal and so strong was the wave of reaction in those days throughout Europe, that Protestant and Catholic rulers agreed in the conviction that of all conservatism the apex and supreme exponent must be the Pope, as representing “the most ancient succession of sovereigns,” as “upholder of things as they are.” Considering themselves the Pope's born allies, they closed their eyes to that stealthy encroachment of absolute Romish power into the dioceses within their territory with which the present generation is becoming acquainted in America as well as in Europe. Bunsen was among those who first discerned the coming danger. To direct official attention towards it, to ward it off by fairness and impartiality towards his Catholic fellow-subjects, to preserve religious peace in his country, thence forward became the main object of his official labours.
At first his success was great. In Berlin the king and his minister, and at Rome each successive Pope and his cardinal secretary, bestowed upon him every mark of confidence and even of affection. King Frederick William III. had made his acquaintance as early as 1822 during a brief stay at Rome, and had taken unwonted pleasure not only in his conversation generally, but even in the outspoken but elegant frankness with which Bunsen defended his views when at variance with one or two of his sovereign's favourite theories. He evinced his appreciation of the youthful diplomatist by desiring him to undertake the legation after Niebuhr's retirement from his office.
In the Papal Government, also, Bunsen's honest endeavours to preserve a good understanding were readily acknowledged, and formed the basis for one of the rarest life friendships, and yet a most real one, with Monsignor Capaccini, the confidential adviser of successive Popes in foreign affairs, who never swerved from his principle of both receiving and meeting every communication of the Prussian envoy with equal trust and truthfulness.
