HUMBOLDT'S BIRTHDAY.
ALEXANDER TON HUMBOLDT completed his eightieth year on Friday the 14th instant, and the announcement of his continued health and unabated faculties is hailed with delight in every land. Few spectacles can be more cheering to the sight than the aged philosopher, wise, happy, and venerated. Humboldt is a living tri- umph over impossibilities, a reconciler of the irreconcilable. After wandering about the globe, not in the hurried career of the tour- ist, but in the patient scrutiny of the naturalist and the geologist —after twenty years spent in literary labours, at Paris, that would have blinded stronger men, building up books upon an enormous scale—he returns to find rest in a court ; and yet again from that ungenial sphere he pours forth his bold philosophy in language unstinted and untarnished.
Two truths often seem opposed to each other, or separately in- credible, till they are brought together : it has been Humboldt's function to bring truths together, and expound their relations in time and space, and thus to rebuke many a needless conflict. From him the despot and the revolutionary, the bigot and the sceptic, may learn the complement to laws of which they see only a part, and may know that what they are fighting for, to blood- shed, is decreed, all in its good time.
The other day, one of last year's "trees of liberty" was blown down in the Place de la Bastile,—a mournful omen to the soldier of liberty ! Humboldt, looking across long ages, sees the laws that govern that blustering wind—he sees the Misfile swept away, the Republic, the Restoration, the Dynasty of the Bour- geoisie, and now this miserable tree typifying such liberty as the French could plant in 1848 and Lamartine " immortalize " ; but beyond, borne on the winds of Time, whose stream cannot be turned back, is the liberty which despots cannot hinder and revo- lutionists cannot snatch. Sitting in the narrow circle of his King's court, Humboldt expounds the laws of the Kosmos, and proclaims the future consummation of human science in the free government of man.
If ever there was a typical man, it is he who still lives with us; whose new gifts are still awaited with expectant gratitude. The universe exists, boundless and eternal ; and he has looked upon it—it has been his, mortal thing creeping upon this earth of ours, to look forth upon the universe in time and space, and to open for his kind that vast and wondrous vision, in all its beauty —not only to their knowledge, but to their affections. It has been his to show, that the political fate of man rests, as to its es- sential progress, on the changeless laws of that universe; his to show that the wisdom of the seer and the station of the court mi- nister may be united with the unpretending good-nature, the practical tolerant virtue, of the honest and kindly man. His own personal success illustrates his philosophy : he has succeeded in small things without forfeiting success in great ; he has played his part in daily life without forgetting eternity ; he has served kings, and borne consolation to the humblest and most oppressed by proclaiming the laws that govern kings, and discovering in the order of the Kosmos the charter of mankind.
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