public life, and after
spending six more years in literary work, struggling with death, yet
reveling in life, he died at Bonn on the 28th of November, 1860. His widow
has devoted the years of her solitude to the noble work of collecting the
materials for a biography of her husband; and we have now in two large
volumes all that could be collected, or, at least, all that could be
conveniently published, of the sayings and doings of Bunsen, the scholar,
the statesman, and, above all, the philosopher and the Christian.
Throughout the two volumes the outward events are sketched by the hand of
the Baroness Bunsen; but there runs, as between wooded hills, the main
stream of Bunsen's mind, the outpourings of his heart, which were given so
freely and fully in his letters to his friends. When such materials exist,
there can be no more satisfactory kind of biography than that of
introducing the man himself, speaking unreservedly to his most intimate
friends on the great events of his life. This is an autobiography, in
fact, free from all drawbacks. Here and there that process, it is true,
entails a greater fullness of detail than is acceptable to ordinary
readers, however highly Bunsen's own friends may value every line of his
familiar letters. But general readers may easily pass over letters
addressed to different persons, or treating of subjects less interesting
to themselves, without losing the thread of the story of the whole life;
while it is sometimes of great interest to see the same subject discussed
by Bunsen in letters addressed to different people. One serious difficulty
in these letters is that they are nearly all translations from the German,
and in the process of translation some of the original charm is inevitably
lost. The translations are very faithful, and they do not sacrifice the
peculiar turn of German thought to the requirements of strictly idiomatic
English. Even the narrative itself betrays occasionally the German
atmosphere in which it was written, but the whole book brings back all the
more vividly to those who knew Bunsen the language and the very
expressions of his English conversation. The two volumes are too bulky,
and one's arms ache while holding them; yet one is loth to put them down,
and there will be few readers who do not regret that more could not have
been told us of Bunsen's life.

All really great and honest men may be said to live three lives: there is
one life which is seen and accepted by