ies according to the ideal demands of its own
nature, and to draw over everything about it the pure lustre of a new
life. It was necessary to him to decorate with the graces of his fancy
and the whole magic of emotional feeling the image of those he loved,
and to adorn his relations with them. There was always something
playful about it, and even where he felt most passionately he loved
more the embellished picture of others, which he carried within him,
than themselves. It was with such a disposition that he kissed
Voltaire's hand. If at any time he sensibly felt the difference betwixt
his ideal and the real man, he dropped the real and cherished the
image. Whoever has received from nature this faculty of investing love
and friendship with the coloured mirror of poetical dispositions, is
sure, according to the judgment of others, to show arbitrariness in the
choice of their objects of preference: a certain equable warmth which
bethinks itself of everything suitable appears to be denied to such
natures. To whoever the King became a friend, in his way, to him he
always showed the greatest consideration and fidelity, however much at
particular moments his disposition towards him might change. He could,
therefore, be sentimental in his sorrow over the loss of such a
cherished image as was only possible for a German of the Werther
period. He had lived for many years in some estrangement from his
sister von Baireuth; it was only in the last year before her death,
amidst the terrors of war, that her image as that of a tender sister
again revived in him. After her death he felt a gloomy satisfaction in
recalling to himself and others, the heartfelt tenderness of this
connection; he built her a small temple, and often made pilgrimages to
it. Whoever failed to reach his heart by means of poetical feelings, or
did not stir up in him the love-web of poetry, or who disturbed
anything in his sensitive nature, to him he was cold, contemptuous, and
indifferent,--a King who only considered how far the other could be of
use to him; and he threw him off perhaps when he no longer needed him.
Such an endowment undoubtedly may have surrounded the life of a young
man with a bright halo; it invested the common with variegated
brilliancy and pleasing colours; but it must be united with much good
moral worth, feeling of duty, and sense of what is higher than itself,
if it is not to isolate and make his old age gloomy. It will also, even
in favou