again, and she was disposed to keep her vow. As she could mot marry Niebuhr herself, he asked her to choose a wife for him; and, after some thought, she selected her own sister Amelia. In his union with this lady Niebuhr was happy for some years. He succeeded in the world, served the state in various high offices, acquired the friendship of the first men in Germany, and through the delivery of his lectures on Roman history at Berlin, raised himself to a high place in the intellectual hierarchy of Europe. His wife died, and he again solicited Dora Hensler to accept his hand. But she adhered to her vow; and again failing in his suit, he again requested her to provide a substitute. It would seem that the vow only stood between her and himself, for she still retained him in the family. This time she selected her cousin Gretchen, and—strange as all this seems to us—he married her. Dora's refusals do not, therefore, appear to have caused any, even momentary suspension of the friendship: between Niebuhr and herself. His letters to her—ever kind, serene, affectionate—present an unbroken series. The moment he parted from her, he began to write to her regularly. In the most trying situations of his life—during the fierce bombardment of Copenhagen—amid the terrors of the flight to Riga before the victorious French—in the sickness of his first months in Italy—amid the excitement of his opening lecture sessions in Berlin—his letters never failed. He wrote a long epistle to her only a few days before he died.
Niebuhr's precocity was something extraordinary. He learnt to write Greek characters in his sixth year, and composed small essays, and made abstracts of Shakspeare's plays before he was nine. He learnt French and English before he was out of his teens, and, on his father's assertion, he knew twenty languages before he had reached his thirtieth year. Born in 1776, his early years fell into a time of great and, indeed, of morbid excitement. As a mere child, he was inoculated with the literary and political mania of the age. Any new work of the great writers of the time was hailed as an important event, the bearings of which lay beyond the reach of human knowledge. Young Niebuhr was taught to thtill with excitement at the sight of a new book from Goethe, Klapstock, or [[Autho:Gotthold Ephraim Lessing |Lessing]]. It was but natural that this time, when his feelings were strongest and freshest, should, at a later period, appear to him as the culminating point of German literature, and that, consequently, that literature seemed to him, in after years, to droop and to decay.
A curious psychological phenomenon presented itself in young Niebuhr. From passing his infancy on the level, marshy plain of Meldorf, he was long insensible to impressions of natural beauty. Thus, writing from Edinburgh in 1798, he says, that nature has denied him the taste for picturesque scenery, but given him instead a perception of the sublime. In later years, however, he was keenly sensible to the charms of a beautiful landscape.
At Kiel, young Niebuhr's favourite study was history. He adopted at that early period of his life elementary ideas, which, in this country, would be scouted as more than: sceptical, and would, as in Mr. Lawrence's case, entail persecution. Thus he writes, on the 7th of June, 1794: "I believe further, that the origin of the human race is not connected with any given place, but is to be sought everywhere over the face of the
