ingen he carried off, in 1812, a prize for an essay on "The Athenian
Law of Inheritance," which attracted more than usual attention, and may,
in fact, be looked upon as one of the first attempts at Comparative
Jurisprudence. In 1713 he writes from Goettingen:--

"Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place. Heyne received me,
guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in himself the
example of a high and noble energy and indefatigable activity in a
calling which was not that to which his merit entitled him; he
might have superintended and administered and maintained an entire
kingdom."

The following passage from the same letter deserves to be quoted as coming
from the pen of a young man of twenty-two:--

"Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
the preceding the full vigor of life."

After leaving the university Bunsen travelled in Germany with young Astor,
and made the acquaintance of Frederic Schlegel at Vienna, of Jacobi,
Schelling, and Thiersch at Munich. He was all that time continuing his own
philological studies, and we see him at Munich attending lectures on
Criminal Law, and making his first beginning in the study of Persian. When
on the point of starting for Paris with his American pupil, the news of
the glorious battle of Leipzig (October, 1813) disturbed their plans, and
he resolved to settle again at Goettingen till peace should have been
concluded. Here, while superintending the studies of Mr. Astor, he plunged
into reading of the most varied character. He writes (p. 51):--

"I remain firm, and strive after my earliest purpose in life, more
felt, perhaps, than already discerned,--namely, to bring over into
my own knowledge and into my own Fatherland the language and the
spirit of the solemn and distant East. I would for the
accomplishment of this object even quit Europe, in order to draw
out of the ancient well that which I find not elsewhere."

This is the first indication of an important element in Bunsen's early
life, his longing for the East, and his all but prophetic anticipation of
the great results which a study of the ancient language of India would one
day yield, and the light it would shed on the darkest pages in the ancient
history of Greece, Italy, and Germany. The study of the Athenian law of
inheritance seems first to hav