THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
quaintance we should have been especially proud to make, but to our great regret we did not find him at home when we returned his visit.
In those days I received the first distinct impression of the English language, an impression, which now, after long acquaintance with it, I can hardly explain to myself.
The celebrated tragedian Macready was playing several Shakespearian parts in one of the London theaters. We saw him in “Macbeth” and “Henry VIII.” Although I did not understand the spoken words, I was sufficiently conversant with those dramas to follow the dialogue, but I had hardly any enjoyment of it, as the impure vowels and the many sibilants, the hissing consonants, in fact, the whole sound and cadence of the English language, fell upon my ear so unmusically, so gratingly, that I thought it a language that I would never be able to learn. And, indeed, this disagreeable first impression long prevented me from taking the study of English seriously in hand.
After a few days of overfatiguing pleasure we started for Paris. To witness the meeting of Kinkel and his wife, after so long and so painful a separation, was hardly less delightful to me than it was to them. But with this delight our arrival in Paris imposed upon me also a heavy burden, which consisted in sudden “fame.” Although I had received in Rostock, in Edinburgh, and in London, in small circles of friends, praise of the warmest kind, I was not a little astonished and embarrassed when I learned in Paris of the sensation created by the liberation of Kinkel. While Kinkel and I had been crossing the North Sea in the cabin of the “Little Anna,” holding navigation councils with Captain Niemann, it had become generally known that I, a student of the university of Bonn, had taken a somewhat important part in that affair. The
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