Boyhood and Apprenticeship
Richard Charles Lepsius was born on the 23d of December, 1810, at Naumburg on the Saal, a pretty town which rises pleasantly from the grape-grown foothills of the Thuringian forest. Here he passed his childhood among circumstances than which none more favorable could have been imagined for the future scholar and antiquarian.
His father, afterwards President of the provincial court of justice and Privy Counsellor, was at that time Saxon Finance Procurator for the whole Thuringian district, and as such one of the leading men of the place and region. Naumburg is rich in fine buildings of the middle ages, and Charles Peter Lepsius, the father of young Richard, applied such leisure as his exacting occupations afforded him to searching out the history of these venerable monuments. It was he who founded the Thuringian-Saxon Archæological Society, the seat of which was subsequently removed to Halle, and the three volumes of his short papers testify to his zeal and ability as an investigator. He is represented as a strict and methodical official, of distinguished bearing, as well as an indefatigable worker; and precisely these qualities fell as a paternal inheritance to his son, and afterwards constituted the conditions of his greatness.
Among those remarkable men who have compassed high aims by means of marked qualities of temperament or of the imaginative faculty, the maternal influence has usually predominated, while in those cases where strength and acuteness of intellect have made a man great, the paternal character has commonly had most weight. A poet like Goethe, a man of faith like Augustine, a Napoleon Bonaparte, whose imagination transgressed all limits, owed what was best in them to their mothers; the mind of a Lepsius, severe, never seeking after uncertainties, but always inclined to profound research, must be an inheritance from the father.
Throughout Thuringia and Saxony all who were interested in antiquities were connected with the archæologists and founders of the society at Naumburg, the air of the house in which the boy grew up was permeated with historical and antiquarian interests, and its master early permitted his son to take part in those occupations which he himself could only pursue as an amateur, and yet to which his tastes so entirely inclined. Thus it is easy to understand how the Minister of Finance, as soon as he recognized the scientific bent of his son, did everything to further it and to make of his child what he himself, under more favorable circumstances, might have become: a great investigator to whom science should be all and everything, the end and aim of existence, in short, the vocation of life.