The missive, at the same time, is intended for a sign of _life_, that is, of most intimate and faithful friendship for you in these sad times of weakness and folly. I have disentangled myself from the new “Stahl-Ranke” council, for reasons which are not those of old age; I resigned. I add an unkempt letter of poor Bunsen, which you must keep quite secret, and send it to me, if there is an opportunity, to my Berlin residence. First Heidelberg and afterwards Bonn, constantly vibrating between the perturbating recollections of two archbishops. With the dangerous tendency of the noble man for theological dispute, and for his newly-invented apostolic church, under the firm of Hippolytus, a residence in England, that is to say, in the country between London and Oxford (on account of the books), would be more favorable than Bonn. The Anglican High Church, intolerant though it be, is less inconvenient in a _free_ country, than a ministerial church diet in Prussia. Moreover, in the interest of Bunsen’s scientific reputation, I look forward with dread to the impending productions, full of hypotheses on aboriginal nations, Egyptian, Indian, and excavated Assyrian Semitic, as also on the situation of Paradise, for which _a map has been ordered_ at Kiepert’s. Maps on the creeds of nations can ascend from the ship-fastening myth at the ocean and the Himalaya mountains to the Ararat and to Aramea Kymbotas, even to the Mexican Coxcox, vagaries, not unknown to the Mormon bible. (See Supplement.) The Weimar fancies are of a more exhilarating kind; controlling the climates by means of crystal palaces, which, at the same time, are taverns, and make superfluous Nicos and Madeira, and demand only a capital of one and a half millions of thalers, an undertaking in the deserted Potsdam town of barracks. And such a device, hatched in the brains of a well-informed man like Froriep. In faithful friendship, yours, A. HUMBOLDT. POTSDAM, _July 4th, 1854_. In the age of crystal palaces. It was but the other day, in glancing at a letter of Gneisenau’s, of 1818 (in the pointless biography of Stein,[69] p. 262) that I stumbled upon a passage, doubtless long familiar to you: “H. strives again for the centre, but there are wanting to him confidence, _esteem_, _character_, and courage.” Sheer personal hatred alone can have moved the vain Gneisenau to speak thus disreputably of my brother. I recollect, indeed, to have heard of him, that Gneisenau was hostile to him when he was dismissed. By-the-by, what was said by all parties in those times on political institutions looks to me now, and did so already in the years 1815–1818, as if I was reading a book of the thirteenth century on physical science; fear of provincial estates was alone praiseworthy—c’est de la bouillie pour les chats.