It seems but yesterday that Bunsen left England; yet it was in 1854 that his house in Carlton Terrace ceased to be the refreshing oasis in London life which many still remember, and that the powerful, thoughtful, beautiful, loving face of the Prussian Ambassador was seen for the last time in London society. Bunsen then retired from public life, and after spending six more years in literary work, struggling with death, yet reveling in life, he died at Bonn on the 28th of November, 1860. His widow has devoted the years of her solitude to the noble work of collecting the materials for a biography of her husband; and we have now in two large volumes all that could be collected, or, at least, all that could be conveniently published, of the sayings and doings of Bunsen, the scholar, the statesman, and, above all, the philosopher and the Christian. Throughout the two volumes the outward events are sketched by the hand of the Baroness Bunsen; but there runs, as between wooded hills, the main stream of Bunsen’s mind, the outpourings of his heart, which were given so freely and fully in his letters to his friends. When such materials exist, there can be no more satisfactory kind of biography than that of introducing the man himself, speaking unreservedly to his most intimate friends on the great events of his life. This is an autobiography, in fact, free from all drawbacks. Here and there that process, it is true, entails a greater fullness of detail than is acceptable to ordinary readers, however highly Bunsen’s own friends may value every line of his familiar letters. But general readers may easily pass over letters addressed to different persons, or treating of subjects less interesting to themselves, without losing the thread of the story of the whole life; while it is sometimes of great interest to see the same subject discussed by Bunsen in letters addressed to different people. One serious difficulty in these letters is that they are nearly all translations from the German, and in the process of translation some of the original charm is inevitably lost. The translations are very faithful, and they do not sacrifice the peculiar turn of German thought to the requirements of strictly idiomatic English. Even the narrative itself betrays occasionally the German atmosphere in which it was written, but the whole book brings back all the more vividly to those who knew Bunsen the language and the very expressions of his English conversation. The two volumes are too bulky, and one’s arms ache while holding them; yet one is loth to put them down, and there will be few readers who do not regret that more could not have been told us of Bunsen’s life.