ical
sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts'
of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute
'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep
reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral
being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve--'more and more
to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to
the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain
conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all
the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from
London, at twenty-two,--'I positively shrink from associating with the
young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory,
not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the
servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of
Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with
details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its
heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as
'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as
certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the
weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the _verified_
quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to
'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act
and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing
genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness
and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors
he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his
motto was _Tecum habita_. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the
nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he
recovered himself in his maturity, and said,--'I do not know what to
do with a metaphysical God, and I will have none but the God of the
Bible, who is heart to heart with us.' 'My son shall believe in the
letter of the Old and New Testaments, and I shall nurture in him from
his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain
about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,'
contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and
affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are
becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one
can well point