To know Rückert personally was a treat. I had heard much about him before I made his acquaintance, when I was a student at Berlin. The Duchess of Anhalt-Dessau, my own peculiar duchess, had in her youth been much admired by the Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William IV. She was herself a Prussian princess, a daughter of Prince Frederick Ludwig Karl of Prussia, who died 1796, and of a Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who after the death of her husband married the Duke of Cumberland, and became Queen of Hanover. This princess, a lady of great natural gifts, highly cultivated and well read, was personally acquainted with some of the most distinguished men in Germany. Even in the narrow sphere in which she had learnt to move and act in Dessau, she did much good in trying to discover young men of talent, and assisting them in their studies. She had always been very gracious to me, and even as a boy I was often invited to play with her _à quatre mains_ at the Castle. I saw her for the last time after I had begun my Oriental studies at Leipzig, and before I went to Berlin. She told me then that she herself had known a little Sanskrit, that she and the young Crown Prince of Prussia had learnt the Sanskrit alphabet, and had corresponded in it, to the great annoyance of people who opened or read all letters that were not meant for them. “When you go to Berlin,” she said, “you must see Rückert, but do not be frightened. I was myself most anxious to see him. The King invited him to dinner, together with a number of his illustrious ménagerie. I asked the King where Rückert was sitting, the poet of ‘Frauenliebe’ and ‘Liebesfrühling.’ ‘Look there,’ the King said. ‘That broad-shouldered boor with his elbows on the table, eating a hunk of bread, that is your poet!’ And a _désillusionnement_ it was,” she said. “Still, I was proud to have seen him and to have talked to him.” So I was prepared.