During the year in Italy all these gifts were employed together. Italy was exactly the land for Haeckel’s temperament, with its mixture of lofty classic elements and natural beauty and simple, naïve unpretentiousness. For the first time he felt that he was a cosmopolitan student. He had never been a devotee of the student’s beer-feasts. He had no need of alcoholic stimulant. Gegenbaur of Würtzburg, the insatiable smoker, once said to him in joke, “If you would only smoke, we might make something out of you.” It was done, in any case. His personal inclinations were in his favour: an illimitable love of travel, good spirits that rose in proportion to the absurdity of his accommodation, and a simple delight in everything human that enabled him to talk and travel with the humblest as if they were his equals. He spent a night with a young worker in a haystack, and when he was asked what he was, he pointed to his paint-box and brush: “House-painter.” “I thought so when I saw you,” said the youth, and he asked Haeckel to start a workshop together with him. Italy was the ideal land for a visitor of that type. There was no part of the world from which he was so pleased to receive recognition in his years of fame as Italy; and he received it in abundance, for the appreciation was mutual. I will add a page here that was supplied for the present work by a friendly hand, a man who is as well known to thousands as Haeckel himself—Hermann Allmers, “the poet of the fens, chief of Frisia, and splendid fellow,” as Haeckel has called him. He died in the spring of 1902 at an advanced age. He met Haeckel in Italy, and tells the story in his verse and prose. Forty years after their meeting he wrote me that Haeckel was “the finest man he ever met.” “TO ERNST HAECKEL. Dost thou remember the magic night, A night I never cease to see, That brought us both to Ischia? How smooth the boat sailed gently in, How silent was the great broad bay Unutterably noble and sublime, In all its star-lit loveliness, As sky and sea met in embrace. With fairy-light the waters gleamed As helm ploughed gently through the wave, And overhead a deep red glow Vesuvius from its larva poured.