Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/217

Rh which modesty shrinks from accepting and which politeness to kind friends forbids to decline—well, one appreciates it very highly and with sincere gratitude, to be sure, but it is an experience, to say the least, of complex sensations.

I therefore offer to my friend Jacobi the sincere and profound sympathy of one who knows. I well understand that troubled gaze of his which he fixes abstractedly upon the table-cloth before him or upon the chandeliers above him, while the floods of eulogy are beating relentlessly upon his devoted head. I understand the peculiar dread with which, no doubt, he has seen me get upon my feet—me, a person that has been acquainted with him for fully fifty years—and who, as he is well aware, knows more about him than any one else here present. Still, in one respect he need have no fear. I shall not reveal about him any obnoxious secrets. Do not understand me as meaning that I could if I would. No, I would not if I could, being mindful of the proprieties of the occasion. I am going to tell the simple truth; and that he will have to bear as a brave man with becoming fortitude.

Yes, of Dr. Jacobi's friends assembled here, I am, no doubt, the oldest, probably the oldest in years, and certainly the oldest in friendship—for that friendship can look back upon just a half century of uninterrupted, and, I may add, unclouded duration. It was in the year 1850, in the German University town of Bonn-on-the-Rhine, that we first met. He was then still a student of medicine in regular standing. I was already an exile, but had secretly come back to Germany, engaged in a somewhat adventurous enterprise connected with the revolutionary movements of that period—an enterprise which made it necessary to conceal my whereabouts from those in power, with whom my relations were at the time, to speak within bounds, somewhat strained. I had the best reasons for