PROFESSOR DOCTOR KINCK VON KINCK. In Berlin, says he, HÖLTY. HERE are few things which afford me more pleasure Europe and rummage among their quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. I highly value the privilege of being allowed to sit at leisure in their alcoves, and pull down one ponderous dusty tome after another, "bound in brass and wild-boar's hide," or in beechen boards and blue, and turn them over, catching now and then from their crabbed black-letter pages some whimsical conceit, or reading some story of those ancient worthies, the best that ever lived "thorough the unyversal world." Nowhere has this pleasure been oftener tinged with a certain pensiveness or melancholy than in the libraries of the Germans,—a feeling almost as sacred as that which should attend the visitor in their village churchyards. Above all other people, the German finds his best companionship in books; and the circles of a society he has found so pleasant he wishes to enlarge, until they shall embrace the whole mundane brotherhood. He willingly relinquishes the enjoyment of social intercourse, his beloved mug, and all the innocent and connubial endearments of his frau, to give himself up wholly to his unselfish labors. With an unwearying and more than paternal affection, he gathers and digs from innumerable sources the choicest roots, buds, and blossoms of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, to furnish forth and embellish therewith the pages he is writing with such fond and confiding assiduity. Each volume we behold on these. shelves informs us of some such earnest life; informs us, perchance, of long years of penury and pain, of nights of sleeplessness and days of hunger, all endured with cheerfulness in the sweet hope of fame, "that last infirmity of noble mind." And now he is dead, long dead; and the book which he wrote, and of which himself was the principal reader, has lived its appointed life, and is found no more among the living, except in these dusty alcoves, or amid the heterogeneous and musty collections of the antiquarian. But when the thoughtful soul passes the antiquated book, or stops awhile to explore its pages and ramble among its obsolete constructions and its queer old cranky involutions, he will not mock him who lived all these laborious days to write what nobody now possesses. It is the counterpart of the author's better self; the faithful Horatio whom the dying Hamlet piteously adjures to linger yet awhile, and in this harsh world draw his breath in pain to tell his story. "He gave the people of his best; His worst he kept, his best he gave." Here, then, in this great library, is a city of the dead. Through its populous recesses we should tread with a greater reverence than along the more pleasant and sunny alleys of the churchyard, for here repose, as it were, the remains of the soul, while yonder is only the mouldering and loathsome body. And while the separate particles of the latter return, by the chemistry of decay, each to its native dust, and appear again, after an innumerable succession of years, to gladden our eyes in the "forms and hues of vegetable beauty," who can tell what seeds of thought may have been planted in fruitful intellects by the mere passing glimpse of a title, or by a casual perusal of these dead and forgotten pages? One day, after a number of hours thus spent in the Royal Library of Berlin, I sauntered into the readingroom. Among the numerous busy inmates, I had my attention particularly attracted by a robust and rosy- or, rather, pink-faced gentleman, who the librarian kindly informed me was none other than the celebrated Professor Doctor Kinck von Kinck. He kept buzzing and bobbing over a great number of large books bound in blue pasteboard, plucking out from a hundred places snippets of sentences and paragraphs, which he industriously transcribed into a memorandumbook. He was quite short-sighted, and as he turned over the pages rapidly, thrusting his nose and green spectacles deep down between them, his motion reminded me of that of an athlete jumping through empty barrels, set on end in a series. My mind recurred at once to the scene so delightfully described by Irving in his "Art of Book-making," and I supposed these persons, as in that sketch, were all professional authors. What was my surprise when the librarian informed me they were all popular lecturers, wholly distinct from the hundred ninety and seven regularly employed in the Royal University! This bit of information piqued my curiosity to know something further concerning them, their audiences, and subjects of discourse. I asked the librarian if it was not a matter of great difficulty to procure audiences for such a multitude of lecturers. He replied that it had become very difficult, and that the lecturers thought of petitioning the Prussian government to institute military levies in their behalf. Even while we were speaking, there presented himself in the library a collector of subscriptions for a series of lectures soon to be delivered "for the especial benefit of the laboring-classes." He was a stout little man, with a rather dirty neck, and two small and very rosy-bright patches of color on his white cheeks, in the manner peculiar to many beer-drinkers. The librarian was a very pale, thin-featured gentleman, with preternaturally large black eyes, and one leg so crooked that he seemed almost to step on the knee. The stout little man deliberately hung his overcoat and hat on the rack, set his cane beneath them, approached, and bowed very low before the librarian, smiling all over his face. The librarian bowed quite low, smiled an official smile, and extended his hand. "Good day, Herr Doctor," said the little man. "Good day, mein Herr," replied the librarian, in a very bland but non-committal voice. The stout little man wore a kind of gray jerkin, gathered tight by a band behind, and edged around the neck and pockets with green binding. From an inside pocket of this he now produced a very thin green memorandumbook, as broad as it was long, with leaves of intensely blue smooth paper. This he handed to the librarian, open at the subscription page. "Herr Doctor," said he, "it gives me the greatest pleasure to inform you that Herr Professor Doctor Kinck von Kinck will lecture to-morrow, at seven o'clock P.M., in Hypothenuse Hall, on the Satires of Horace. I have the honor to say, Herr Doctor,"-here he bowed quite low," that he has commissioned me to solicit the honor of your subscription." Upon that the librarian bowed, and smiled that painfully polite official smile, so exquisitely and so inexpressibly less than nothing, so far as meaning is concerned, that such an attack as this must slip off it as rain-drops off a duck's feathers. "Mein Herr," he replied, "it gives me great pleasure to learn that the Herr Professor Doctor Kinck von Kinck will lecture. I need not assure you, certainly, that none knows better than myself how to value the opportunity thus afforded of profiting by the Herr Professor's acknowledged great learning, if my official engagements would permit." Here both bow quite low again, and smile, and the stout little man resumes: "The price of admission, Herr Doctor, has been set very low; only four silver Groschen per ticket." Again that exquisitely and excruciatingly polite official smile the only answer the honored Herr Doctor deigns to give to a suggestion so immeasurably and so insufferably contemptible as that relating to money. The little man now trains on him his last battery, and very complacently, for he knows it will succeed. "Herr Doctor, I believe your next lecture is to be -?" "A week from to-day, mein Herr," says the learned Herr Doctor librarian, promptly. "And the subject, I believe-?" "On a singular mass of fused flint recently found in the ashes of a burnt haystack." The Herr Doctor an |