No one who heard him relate this story could help liking him.

Another distinguished visitor at Hirsau was Prince Puckler Muskau.  He had heard that his young Kottbus acquaintance had begun to devote himself to Egyptology.  This interested the old man, who, as a special favourite of Mohammed Ali, had spent delightful days on the Nile and made all sorts of plans for Egypt.  Besides, he was personally acquainted with the great founders of my science, Thomas Young and Francois Champollion, and had obtained an insight into deciphering the hieroglyphics.  He knew all the results of the investigations, and expressed an opinion concerning them.  Without having entered deeply into details he often hit the nail on the head.  I doubt whether he had ever held in his hand a book on these subjects, but he had listened to the answers given by others to his skilful questions with the same keen attention that he bestowed on mine, and the gift of comprehension peculiar to him enabled him to rapidly shape what he heard into a distinctly outlined picture.  Therefore he must have seemed to laymen a very compendium of science, yet he never used this faculty to dazzle others or give himself the appearance of erudition.

“Man cannot be God,” he wrote—­I am quoting from a letter received the day after his visit—­“yet ‘to be like unto God’ need not remain a mere theological phrase to the aspirant.  Omniscience is certainly one of the noblest attributes of the Most High, and the nearer man approaches it the more surely he gains at least the shadow of a quality to which he cannot aspire.”

Finally he discussed his gardening work in the park at Branitz, and I regret having noted only the main outlines of what he said, for it was as interesting as it was admirable.  I can only cite the following sentence from a letter addressed to Blasewitz:  “What was I to do?  A prince without a country, like myself, wishes at least to be ruler in one domain, and that I am, as creator of a park.  The subjects over whom I reign obey me better than the Russians, who still retain a trace of free will, submit to their Czar.  My trees and bushes obey only me and the eternal laws implanted in their nature, and which I know.  Should they swerve from them even a finger’s breadth they would no longer be themselves.  It is pleasant to reign over such subjects, and I would rather be a despot over vegetable organisms than a constitutional king and executor of the will of the ‘images of God,’ as men call the sovereign people.”

He talked most delightfully of the Viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, and described the plan which he had laid before this brilliant ruler of arranging a park around the temple on the island of Philae, and creating on the eastern bank of the hill beneath shady trees, opposite to the beautiful island of Isis, a sanitarium especially for consumptives; and whoever has seen this lovely spot will feel tempted to predict great prosperity for such an enterprise.  My mother had heard the prince indulge in paradoxical assertions in gay society, and the earnestness which he now showed led her to remark that she had never seen two natures so radically unlike united in one individual.  Had she been able to follow his career in life she would have recovered a third, fourth, and fifth.