It is my intention here briefly to record the impression which I still retain of my transient intercourse with this celebrated man. Such a record can scarce be considered as a breach of confidence, an invasion of the sacred domains of private life: the author of the "_Leben Jesu_" is a public, I had almost said, an historical character. Up to his arrival in Weimar, my relation to Strauss had been merely of that mystic, invisible, and impersonal description, which usually subsists between a gifted writer and his readers. But even before I knew the language, and, by consequence, before I could read the works of Strauss, I had heard much and often of the young Tubingen theologian, who, at the age of twenty-seven years, with all the moral courage of a Luther, all the critical skill, and more than all the learning of a Lessing, had arisen and _implicitly_ declared to the whole German nation, and to the world at large, that their belief rested on a false basis (in his opinion). Though educated in a country where every man reads and reverences his Bible, I had likewise arrived at that, in every sense, _critical_ period, which is, I suppose, common to all men of an inquiring disposition. I, too, had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge--had become as a god in my own conceit, knowing good from evil. I had passed through the French and English schools of skepticism, with my orthodoxy, if not intact, at least not vitally injured. To study Strauss, therefore, seemed a mere matter of course. Well; I read his celebrated work. It contained nothing absolutely new, either in assertion or opinion. I had met with the same or similar elsewhere. And yet the very same _wooden_ arguments I had so often smiled at in the writings of the French and English free-thinkers, seemed here to annihilate me. In vain I said to myself, "they are still wooden!" Strauss had so sheathed and bound them with his triple fold of _brass_. In other words, had so supported and confirmed them with his unheard-of array of learning, logic, and science; that nothing, I thought, could resist them. It seemed as if the world-old, hereditary feud between faith and reason were here to be terminated for ever. As I read, the solid earth seemed to be giving way beneath me; and when I at length closed the ominous volume, I could have almost cried out with the chorus in Faust: "Woe! woe! thou hast shattered the lovely world!" It is unusual, I believe, to speak out these bosom secrets in this way; but I thought it necessary to give you this, by no means exaggerated description of my first spiritual encounter with the author of the _Leben Jesu_, in order that you might have some idea of the feelings with which, on the third morning after his arrival in Weimar, I received and read the following whimsical note: _Weimar_, 15th August. "A. S. requests the pleasure of Mr. M----'s company to-day, at two o'clock, to soup and Strauss."