“What other university people would you like to see?” said Bancroft to me one day.  I mentioned von Ranke, Lepsius, and Mommsen as men whose names were familiar, whose faces I should like to look upon.

“Find out the sprech-stunden of these men,” said Bancroft to his secretary, and presently a slip was put into my hand containing the hours at which I could be conveniently received.  Following the direction, I was one day admitted to the library of von Ranke, a plain apartment walled by books from floor to ceiling, with a desk well-worn by days and nights of work.  As I awaited his entrance the facts of his career were vivid in my mind.  He was a man of seventy-five and had been a scholar almost from his cradle.  He was known to me particularly through his history of the popes, which was and perhaps is still the judicial authority with regard to the line of pontiffs, but that was only one book among many.  He belonged to a class of which Germany has been prolific, whose consciences assault them if they let their pens lie idle, and who have no recourse in self-defence but building about themselves a barricade of books.  After researches in various fields, von Ranke now was undertaking a history of the world, with no thought apparently of a probable touch from the dart of death in the near future; and he did indeed live until nearly ninety and long produced a volume a year.

He entered presently from an inner room, rather a short, well-rounded figure with a face marked by a clear eye and much vivacity.  He conversed well in English and was curious about American education and offered, rather ludicrously, I remember, to exchange the publications of the University of Berlin with those of the little fresh-water college in which I was at that time a young teacher.  Could the scholar be aiming a sly sarcastic hit at the bareness of our educational outposts in the West?  But no, his frank look and voice showed that he was unaware of the real conditions.  The talk was not long, there was a hearty expression of regard for Mr. Bancroft who was fully accepted by the German learned world as one of their Gelehrten, trained as he had been in youth in their schools, and in that day our best-known historian.  I bowed myself out respectfully from the presence of the little man and sincerely hope that the merit of his great history is in no way abated because I took a half-hour of his time.

I met Lepsius, the great Egyptian scholar, one afternoon in his garden, a hale, straight man of sixty with abundant grey hair surmounting a fine forehead, with blue eyes full of penetration behind his spectacles.  I had little knowledge of the subject he had studied so profoundly and almost laughed outright when his pretty daughter asked me if I had read her father’s translation of the Book of the Dead.  Of von Ranke’s themes I thought I knew something and was more at ease with him, as with Mommsen whom I met about the same time.