Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/127

 knew him thirty-two years of age; the son of an evangelical minister stationed in a village on the Rhine, and he himself also to be educated for the church. To this end he visited the universities of Bonn and Berlin. In the year 1836 he settled down at the university of Bonn as a teacher of church history. But on account of his health he made a journey to Italy in 1837, where he gave himself up to the study of the history of art. After his return he became assistant preacher of an evangelical church in Cologne, where he attracted large congregations by the eloquence of his sermons. In the meantime his poetical gifts, which by personal intercourse with Simrock, Wolfgang Müller, Freiligrath and others had been constantly stimulated, had attracted wide attention. Especially his romantic epic, “Otto der Schütz,” won for him a prominent name in literature. In Cologne he became acquainted with the divorced wife of a bookseller, a woman of extraordinary mental activity. While rowing on the Rhine one day Kinkel saved her from drowning, the boat having capsized, and soon after, in the year 1843, they were married. This union with a divorced Roman Catholic woman would alone have sufficed to make his position as an evangelical clergyman untenable, had it not already been undermined by his outspoken liberal opinions. For this reason he abandoned theology and accepted a position of professor-extraordinary of art-history at the university of Bonn.

As a lecturer he proved himself exceedingly attractive by his interesting personality as well as by the charm of his delivery. Kinkel was a very handsome man, of regular features and herculean stature, being over six feet in height and a picture of strength. He had a wonderful voice, both strong and soft, high and low, powerful and touching in its tone, gentle as a flute and thundering like a trombone—a voice which