Through love, mutual faith, and a common aim towards acquiring, manifesting, and acting out knowledge, there has grown up round me a little company of men bound together by beautiful human bonds, the like of which you would with difficulty find elsewhere.  In your last letter you desired to have some account of these friends and members of my household.  I will describe them for you.

But if my account is to be anything more than a lifeless list of names, and if, though it cannot be the closely-branched tree of life which actually exists, it is at least to come as near it as a garland or a nosegay to the tree, you must permit me to go back a little into my past life; for out of the self-same spirit, whence arose my own endeavours and which gave its direction to my own life, arose also the circle of those friends who are now so closely united with me.

The German war of 1813, in which so much seed-corn was sowed that perhaps only the smaller part of it has yet sprung up, to say nothing of blossoming and fruitage, sowed also the seed whence sprang the first beginnings of our association, and of our harmonious circle.  In April 1813 Jahn led me and other Berlin students to meet my future comrades in arms, Luetzow’s “Black Troop;” we went from Berlin to Dresden, and thence for the most part to Leipzig.  On this march Jahn made me acquainted before we reached Meissen with another Berlin student, Heinrich Langethal, of Erfurt, as a fellow-countryman of mine; and Langethal introduced me to his friend and fellow-student in theology, Middendorff, of Brechten, near Dortmund.[108]

A wonderfully lovely spring evening spent together by the friendly shores of Elbe, and a visit to the magnificent Cathedral of Meissen, brought me nearer to these and other comrades; but it was the pleasant banks of Havel at Havelberg, the charming situation of the grand cathedral, the “Rhine Travels” of Georg Forster, a common love for nature, and above all a common eager yearning for higher culture that bound us three for ever together.[109]

The war in all its exhilaration and depression, its privation and pleasure, its transient and its permanent aspects, flowed on; sometimes nearer to us, sometimes further away.  In August 1814 I was released from service, and returned to Berlin, there to enter upon the post[110] at the University Museum, which I have already mentioned.

Soon after, quite unexpectedly, I ran against my friends again, who had come back to Berlin to finish their studies.  After being somewhat separated by the nature of our work, they as eagerly studying theology as I did natural science, our common need and inner aspiration brought us once more together.  They had taken some private teaching, and were frequently driven to seek my counsel and instruction by the difficulties of their new position.  When the war broke out afresh in 1815, Middendorff had been living for several months previously with me as room companion.  Thus had life thrown us closely together, so that I could see each one exactly as he was, in all his individuality, with his qualities and his deficiencies, with what he could contribute, and what he would have to receive from others.