Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ScientistsHubbard, Elbert
Science
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
Hubbard, Elbert
Scientists -- Biography
And so John Tyndall bade the ideal life good-by, and went out into the
stress, strife and struggle, resolved to spend his two thousand dollars
in bettering his education, and then to start life anew.
* * * * *
Robert Owen had been over to America and had met Emerson, and very
naturally caught it. When he returned home he gave young Tyndall a copy
of Emerson's first book, the "Essay on Nature," published anonymously.
Tyndall read and re-read the book, and read it aloud to others and spoke
of it as a "message from the gods."
He also read every word that Carlyle put in print. It was Carlyle who
introduced him to German philosophy and German literature, and fired him
with a desire to see for himself what Germany was doing.
Germany had still another mystic tie that drew him thitherward. It was
at Marburg, Germany, that his illustrious namesake had published his
translation of the Bible.
At Marburg there was a University, small, 't was true, but its
simplicity and the cheapness of living there were recommendations. So to
Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called
"Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's
taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law
not understood.
Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees
to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy
at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place
appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a
continual temptation.
But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a
practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in
the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every
morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a
mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk
German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical
abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college
give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental
frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and
great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly
enacts his best."
Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the
following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled
energetically."
One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the
hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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