d help liking him.

Another distinguished visitor at Hirsau was Prince Puckler Muskau.
He had heard that his young Kottbus acquaintance had begun to devote
himself to Egyptology. This interested the old man, who, as a special
favourite of Mohammed Ali, had spent delightful days on the Nile and
made all sorts of plans for Egypt. Besides, he was personally acquainted
with the great founders of my science, Thomas Young and Francois
Champollion, and had obtained an insight into deciphering the
hieroglyphics. He knew all the results of the investigations, and
expressed an opinion concerning them. Without having entered deeply into
details he often hit the nail on the head. I doubt whether he had ever
held in his hand a book on these subjects, but he had listened to the
answers given by others to his skilful questions with the same keen
attention that he bestowed on mine, and the gift of comprehension
peculiar to him enabled him to rapidly shape what he heard into a
distinctly outlined picture. Therefore he must have seemed to laymen
a very compendium of science, yet he never used this faculty to dazzle
others or give himself the appearance of erudition.

"Man cannot be God," he wrote--I am quoting from a letter received the
day after his visit--"yet 'to be like unto God' need not remain a mere
theological phrase to the aspirant. Omniscience is certainly one of the
noblest attributes of the Most High, and the nearer man approaches it
the more surely he gains at least the shadow of a quality to which he
cannot aspire."

Finally he discussed his gardening work in the park at Branitz, and I
regret having noted only the main outlines of what he said, for it
was as interesting as it was admirable. I can only cite the following
sentence from a letter addressed to Blasewitz: "What was I to do? A
prince without a country, like myself, wishes at least to be ruler in
one domain, and that I am, as creator of a park. The subjects over whom
I reign obey me better than the Russians, who still retain a trace of
free will, submit to their Czar. My trees and bushes obey only me and
the eternal laws implanted in their nature, and which I know. Should
they swerve from them even a finger's breadth they would no longer be
themselves. It is pleasant to reign over such subjects, and I would
rather be a despot over vegetable organisms than a constitutional
king and executor of the will of the 'images of God,' as men call the
sovereign people."