y
obstacles to be surmounted ere he could obtain permission to attend the
Berlin University; for the law required every native of Erfurt, who
intended afterwards to aspire to any office, to study at least two years
in his native city--at that time French. But, in defiance of all
hindrances, he found his way to Berlin, and in 1811 was entered in the
university just established there as the first student from Erfurt. He
wished to devote himself to theology, and Neander, De Wette, Marheineke,
Schleiermacher, etc., must have exerted a great power of attraction over
a young man who desired to pursue that study.

At the latter's lectures he became acquainted with Middendorf. At first
he obtained little from either. Schleiermacher seemed to him too
temporizing and obscure. "He makes veils." He thought the young
Westphalian, at their first meeting, merely "a nice fellow." But in time
he learned to understand the great theologian, and the "favourite
teacher" noticed him and took him into his house.

But first Fichte, and then Friedrich August Wolf, attracted him far more
powerfully than Schleiermacher. Whenever he spoke of Wolf his calm
features glowed and his blind eyes seemed to sparkle. He owed all that
was best in him to the great investigator, who sharpened his pupil's
appreciation of the exhaustless store of lofty ideas and the magic of
beauty contained in classic antiquity, and had he been allowed to follow
his own inclination, he would have turned his back on theology, to devote
all his energies to the pursuit of philology and archaeology.

The Homeric question which Wolf had propounded in connection with Goethe,
and which at that time stirred the whole learned world, had also moved
Langethal so deeply that, even when an old man, he enjoyed nothing more
than to speak of it to us and make us familiar with the pros and cons
which rendered him an upholder of his revered teacher. He had been
allowed to attend the lectures on the first four books of the Iliad,
and--I have living witnesses of the fact--he knew them all verse by
verse, and corrected us when we read or recited them as if he had the
copy in his hand.

True, he refreshed his naturally excellent memory by having them all read
aloud. I shall never forget his joyous mirth as he listened to my
delivery of Wolf's translation of Aristophanes's Acharnians; but I was
pleased that he selected me to supply the dear blind eyes. Whenever he
called me for this purpose he a