Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/572

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562
biography of hegel.

oric, thoroughly real and absorbed in the business of the moment, ever pressing forwards, and often extremely dogmatic in his assertions, Hegel enchained his students by the intensity of his speculative power. His voice was in harmony with his eye. It was a great eye, but it looked inwards; and the momentary glances which it threw outwards seemed to issue from the very depths of idealism, and arrested the beholder like a spell. His accent was rather broad, and without sonorous ring; but through its apparent commonness there broke that lofty animation which the might of knowledge inspires, and which, in moments when the genius of humanity was adjuring the audience through his lips, left no hearer unmoved. In the sternness of his noble features there was something almost calculated to strike terror, had not the beholder been again propitiated by the gentleness and cordiality of the expression. A peculiar smile bore witness to the purest benevolence, but it was blended with something harsh, cutting, sorrowful, or rather ironical. His, in short, were the tragic lineaments of the philosopher, of the hero whose destiny it is to struggle with the riddle of the universe."

Hegel died at Berlin in 1831. He was cut off suddenly by cholera. The disease seems to have attacked his brain principally, and to have run a milder course than is usual with that formidable malady. The regulation which declared that all persons dying of cholera should be buried in a sepa-