Historic Oddities and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Historic Oddities and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History; Mysticism; Patarines
It will be interesting to see in a German professor devoted to the
severest, most abstract and super-mundane of studies, the appearance,
course, and dying away of the "malady" of love. We almost believe that
this case is so easy of analysis that the very _bacillus_ may be
discovered.
Before, however, we come to the story of Professor Maedler's love
episode, we must say a word about his previous history.
Maedler was born at Berlin on May 29th, 1794, in the very month of love,
though at its extreme end. He began life as a schoolmaster, but soared
in his leisure hours into a purer atmosphere than that of the
schoolroom; he began to study the stars, and found them brighter and
more interesting than the heads of his pupils.
In 1828 William Beer, the Berlin banker, brother of the great composer,
Meyerbeer, a Jew, built a small observatory in the suburbs of Berlin. He
had made the acquaintance of Maedler, they had the same love of the
stars, and they became close friends.
The Beers were a gifted family, running out in different directions.
Michael, a third brother, was a poet, and wrote tragedies, one or two of
which occasionally reappear on the boards.
The result of the nightly star gazings was an article on Mars when in
opposition, with a drawing of the surface as it appeared to Beer and
Maedler, through the telescope of the former.
But Mars did not admit of much further scrutiny, it presented no more
problems they were capable of solving, so they devoted themselves to the
moon. A gourmand exists from dinner to dinner, that meal is the climax
of his vitality, that past he lapses into inertness, indifference,
quiescence. Full moon was the exciting moment of the periods in
Maedler's life, which was divided, not like a gourmand's day, into
periods of twenty-four hours, but into lunar months. When the moon began
to show, Maedler began to live; his interest, the pulses of his life
quickened as full moon approached, then declined and went to sleep when
there was no lunar disc in the sky. From 1834 to 1836 he issued his
great map of the moon, and so made his name. But beyond that, in the
summer of 1833 he was employed by the Russian Government on a
chronometrical expedition in the Baltic.
When his map came out, he was at once secured by the Prussian Government
as assistant astronomer to the observatory at Berlin, recently erected.
In 1840 he became a professor, and was summoned to take charge of the
observatory, and lecture on astronomy, in the Russian University of
Dorpat. There he spent six uneventful years. He was unmarried,
indifferent to female society, and as cold as his beloved moon. He was
as solitary, as far removed from the ideas of love and matrimony, as the
Man in the Moon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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