ling of moving
on an _inclined plane_, or that of sitting down among ruins, as if
he were settled in a well-stored house."

Of Newman, whom he had met at Oxford, Bunsen says:--

"This morning I have had two hours at breakfast with Newman. O! it
is sad,--he and his friends are truly intellectual people, but they
have lost their ground, going exactly _my way_, but stopping short
in the middle. It is too late. There has been an amicable change
of ideas and a Christian understanding. Yesterday he preached a
beautiful sermon. A new period of life begins for me; may God's
blessing be upon it!"

Oxford made a deep impression on Bunsen's mind. He writes:--

"I am luxuriating in the delights of Oxford. There has never been
enough said of this queen of all cities."

But what as a German he admired and envied most was, after all, the House
of Commons:--

"I wish you could form an idea of what I felt. I saw for the first
time _man_, the member of a true Germanic State, in his highest,
his proper place, defending the highest interests of humanity with
the wonderful power of speech-wrestling, but with the arm of the
spirit, boldly grasping at or tenaciously holding fast power, in
the presence of his fellow-citizens, submitting to the public
conscience the judgment of his cause and of his own uprightness. I
saw before me the empire of the world governed, and the rest of
the world controlled and judged, by this assembly. I had the
feeling that, had I been born in England, I would rather be dead
than not sit among and speak among them. I thought of my own
country, and was thankful that I _could_ thank God for being a
German and being myself. But I felt, also, that we are all
children on this field in comparison with the English; how much
they, with their discipline of mind, body, and heart, can effect
even with but moderate genius, and even with talent alone! I drank
in every word from the lips of the speakers, even those I
disliked."

More than a year was thus spent in England in the very fullness of life.
"My stay in England in 1838-39," he writes at a later time, the 22d of
September, 1841, "was the poetry of my existence as a man; this is the
prose of it. There was a dew upon those fifteen months, which the sun has
dried up, and which nothing can restore." Yet even then Bunsen could not
have been