This beautiful monition from a rigorously truthful man contains the confession that impulsiveness was an old fault of his own. But it includes at the same time a strong condemnation thereof, and a summons to battle against it. The remedy which he here declared to be efficacious he had tried on himself, and who knows with what grievous struggles he arrived at that dominion over the impulses of a strong nature, that restraint of external forms, and the practice of those refined and well-bred manners, which already distinguished him when he came to Rome, and which awakened the regard of Frau v. Bunsen (See page 98). It was certainly his honest and firm will and his manly strength, which led him to victory, but not these alone, for through his admonition we can hear the echo of Luther’s “Nothing is done by our own might, ... may the Right Man aid us in the fight.” His firm trust in God, his simple but genuine Christianity, free from every misinterpretation, self-torment and extravagance, supported him in that hard conflict. In the beginning of his twentieth year he had already set before himself his ideal of life, and this, supported by the energy of his harmoniously constituted nature, he pursued to the end, first with struggle and conflict, and finally without any extraordinary effort, and as if of his own free will. In Paris, on the occasion of the unveiling of the Vendôme column (Page 61) he wrote: “What can make a deeper impression than the strength of mind which shows itself in a composed bearing and an expression of control, in contrast with the unbridled passions of similar human minds.” To win this “composed bearing,” to acquire perfect command over unbridled impulses, was the aim of all his labor with himself. No, the character of a Lepsius did not come into the world as a thing completed, did not spring like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus: it was won by hard, prolonged and repeated struggles. In this campaign against an adversary who, however often he may be slain, continually wakens to new life, he accustomed himself to consider impulsiveness as an enemy, as a peace-breaker, as a disease of sound human nature. This latter, to his eyes, could only be truly great when ruled by calm self-control. Here we find an explanation of the words which he wrote to Bunsen when twenty-nine years old, and which must appear paradoxical and startling to the uninitiated. During his sojourn in England in 1839 his heart had been won by a lovely maiden, but his material circumstances would not permit him to woo her. All this he confessed to his sympathetic patron in reply to his enquiries, and added, “I hold every passion to be a defect in love, and why shall I, at the very outset, declare myself too weak to preserve the purity of true love, and keep it from cooling into passion?”