and mine. Oh
those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true,
pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over;
and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred;--and the
all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never
looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay not _cruel_
altogether, let me say: huge, profound, _unspeakable,_ that is
the word.--You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed
with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the
oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a
strange originality, as if it had never happened before.--
Forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be
helped. "Paradise is under the shadow of our swords," said the
Emir: "Forward!"--

I make no way in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely
through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even
English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons
of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail.
For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking
creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned
all manner of extinct German shadows,--who answer nothing but
mumblings. And on the whole Fritz himself is not sufficiently
divine to me, far from it; and I am getting old, and heavy of
heart;--and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write
any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the
element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can
at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with
dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of
_Frederic_ is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and
Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth
Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and
scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before;
and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him,
he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically _lies_
THERE;--and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had
of him, or at least of _writing_ about him; for as to him, he
with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere.--Pity me, pity
me; I know not on what hand to turn; and have such a Chaos
filling all my Earth and Heaven as was seldom seen in British or
Foreign Literature! Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature
itself, is not growing m