uth, nor
the enthusiasm that then animated me. It is time that the war should
come to an end, for my preachings become tedious, and my hearers will
soon complain of me."

To Frau von Camas he writes:--"You speak of the death of poor F----.
Ah, dear mamma, for six years I have mourned more for the living than
for the dead."

Thus did the King write and grieve, but he held out; and any one who is
startled by the gloomy energy of his resolves, must guard himself from
thinking that these were the highest expressions of the powers of this
wonderful mind. It is true that the King had moments of depression,
when he desired death under the fire of the enemy rather than seek it
from his own hand out of the phial which he carried about him. It is
true that he was firmly determined not to bring destruction on his
State by allowing himself to live as a prisoner of the Austrians. There
was a fearful truth in all that he wrote; but he was of a poetic
disposition; he was a child of the century, which had such a craving
for great deeds, and took delight in the expression of exalted
feelings; he was, to his heart's core, a German, with the same longings
as the immeasurably weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The
contemplation and decided utterance of this last resolve gave him
inward freedom and cheerfulness. He wrote concerning it also to his
sister of Baireuth, in the dismal second year of the war, and this
letter is particularly characteristic;[19] for she also had decided not
to outlive the fall of her house; and he approved this decision, to
which, however, he paid little attention, being immersed in the gloomy
satisfaction of his own reflections. Both these royal children had once
secretly recited together the _roles_ of French tragedies in the strict
parental house; now their hearts beat again in unison, both thinking of
freeing themselves, by an antique death, from a life full of illusions,
errors, and sufferings. But when the excited and nervous sister fell
dangerously ill, Frederic forgot all his stoical philosophy, and, with
a passionate tenderness that still clung to life, he fretted and
grieved about her who was the dearest to him of his family; and when
she died, his sorrow was, perhaps, more severe from feeling that he had
enacted a tragic part in the tender life of the woman. Thus, strangely,
was mixed in the greatest German that arose in the eighteenth century,
poetical feeling and the wish to appear charming and great