Bunsen, this wide and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point.  In 1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life—­his acquaintance, and the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and from this time he felt himself a Prussian.  “That State in Northern Germany,” he writes to Brandis in 1815, “which gladly receives every German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus entering as a citizen born, is the true Germany":—­

That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit] should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management, there are defects and imperfections....  We intend to be in Berlin in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my destinies.

After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy.  There, enjoying Niebuhr’s society, “equally sole in his kind with Rome,” he took up his abode, and plunged into study.  He gave up his plans of Oriental travel, finding he could do all that he wanted without them.  Too much a student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could not do “without impairing his whole scheme of mental development,” he nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who became his wife.  And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis, Niebuhr’s secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in which he continued for the greater part of his life.

It may be questioned whether Bunsen’s career answered altogether successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work, without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began.  He piqued himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to which to devote his whole life—­“be it a dictionary like Johnson’s or a history like Gibbon’s”—­and on having discerned and chosen his own object.  And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours, in very much the same language in which he might have described it in the last year of his life:—­