Ehmcke Latein

Beauty is shrouded in mystery, it delights and enchants us without us usually being able to explain why it makes us so deeply happy. It seems like a riddle to us that these lines and colors, these sounds and words, these shapes and forms can grip and enchant us so much, and if all phenomena of beauty, despite their infinite diversity, seem to make a similar impression on us, if we believe we find in all of them what we call beautiful, then it seems almost inconceivable that such fundamentally different things as a thunderstorm, the Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe's Faust and a Strauss waltz should have something in common that makes us perceive them as beautiful. Solving this riddle is the task of aesthetics. Or, at least that’s how Google translates the note at the back of this specimen of F.H. Ehmcke’s eponymous Latein from 1925. It also includes reference to alternate ligatures, which seems somewhat unrelated but, hey, beauty is shrouded in mystery.