There I found the old man working in his farmyard like a real peasant, pitchforking manure into his cart, and carting it off to the fields. He was delighted to see me, and when he had washed his hands he came into his study to shake hands, and to talk about the work on which I was then engaged. Rückert was a scholar with whom one could discuss any question quite freely. Even if one had to differ from him, he was never offended by contradiction. When we could not agree he used to say: “We will leave this for the present, and discuss it another time.” He told me, among other things, how my father had saved his life. The two young men were travelling together on foot in Italy. Italy was at that time, in the beginning of the century, the cynosure of every German student, and of every German poet. Goethe had described it, and they all wanted to follow in Goethe’s footsteps, and pass their “Wanderjahre” in the “Land wo die Citronen blühn!” How they did it with a few thalers in their pockets we can hardly understand, but it was done. Rückert and my father were travelling on foot, and they had often to sleep in the poorest _osterias_. In these wretched hovels they got more than they had bargained for, and one fine morning, after getting out into the fresh air, they saw a lake, and my father jumped in to have a bath. Rückert could not resist, and followed. But he could not swim, the lake was deeper than he had thought, and he was on the point of drowning when my father swam towards him and rescued him. “I wrote my first epic poem then, in the style of Camoens,” said Rückert, with a loud chuckle, “and I called it the ‘Lousiade,’ but it has never been published.” After this visit I lost sight of Rückert, as of many of my German friends. But I still possess the manuscript of a metrical and rhymed version of the Sanskrit poem the “Meghadûta, the Cloud Messenger,” which I made and afterwards published (in 1847), and which contains a number of corrections and suggestions made by Rückert in pencil. “I translated it myself,” he said to me, “but I shall not publish my translation now.” During my stay in Paris, as I remarked, there was no time for poets or poetry. I had to sit up night after night to copy and collate Sanskrit MSS., and I shall never forget how often I screwed down my green-shaded lamp in the morning and saw the sun slowly rising over the Boulevard, and lighting up the arch of the Porte St. Martin. I lived _au cinquième_ in a corner house of the Boulevard de la Madeleine, in a house which exists no longer, or at all events has been very much changed, so that on my last visit I could not find my windows again. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS II