Mieczyslaw remained in Berlin raging against himself because, an intellectual epicurean, he was enjoying Oriental studies instead of following in the footsteps of his father, his brothers, and most of his relatives at home.

My ideas of the heroes of Polish liberty had been formed from Heinrich Heine’s Noble Pole, and I met my companion with a certain feeling of distrust.  Far from pressing upon me the thoughts which moved him so deeply, it was long ere he permitted the first glimpse into his soul.  But when the ice was once broken, the flood of emotion poured forth with elementary power, and his sincerity was sealed by his blood.  He fell armed on the soil of his home at the time when I was most gratefully rejoicing in the signs of returning health—­the year 1863.  I was his only friend in Berlin, but I was warmly attached to him, and shall remember him to my life’s end.

The last winter of imprisonment also saw me industriously at work.  I had already, with Mieczyslaw, devoted myself eagerly to the history of the ancient East, and Lepsius especially approved these studies.  The list of the kings which I compiled at that time, from the most remote sources to the Sassanida, won the commendation of A. von Gutschmid, the most able investigator in this department.  These researches led me also to Persia and the other Asiatic countries.  Egypt, of course, remained the principal province of my work.  The study of the kings from the twenty-sixth dynasty—­that is, the one with which the independence of the Pharaohs ended and the rule of the Persians under Cambyses began in the valley of the Nile—­occupied me a long time.  I used the material thus acquired afterward for my habilitation essay, but the impulse natural to me of imparting my intellectual gains to others had induced me to utilize it in a special way.  The material I had collected appeared in my judgment exactly suited for a history of the time that Egypt fell into the power of Persia.  Jacob Burckhardt’s Constantine the Great was to serve for my model.  I intended to lay most stress upon the state of civilization, the intellectual and religious life, art, and science in Egypt, Greece, Persia, Phoenicia, etc., and after most carefully planning the arrangement I began to write with the utmost zeal.

[I still have the unfinished manuscript; but the farther I advanced the stronger became the conviction, now refuted by Eduard Meyer, that it would not yet be possible to write a final history of that period which would stand the test of criticism.]

While thus engaged, the land of the Pharaohs, the Persian court, Greece in the time of the Pisistratidae and Polycrates grew more and more distinct before my mental vision.  Herodotus’s narrative of the false princess sent by Pharaoh Amasis to Cambyses as a wife, and who became the innocent cause of the war through which the kingdom of the Pharaohs lost its independence, would not bear criticism, but it was certainly usable material for a dramatic or epic poem.  And this material gave me no peace.