great poet of the nation, by
the wonderful creations of his mind in prose and verse, dispelled all
dark forebodings. King and Queen were guillotined, and "Reineke Fuchs"
made into a poem; there came, together with Robespierre and the reign
of terror, letters on the aesthetic training of men; with the battles of
Lodi and Arcole, "Wilhelm Meister," "Horen," and "Xenien"; with the
French acquisition of Belgium, "Hermann and Dorothea"; with the French
conquest of Switzerland and the States of the Pope, "Wallenstein"; with
the French seizure of the left bank of the Rhine, the "Bastard of
Orleans"; with the occupation of Hanover by Napoleon, the "Bride of
Messina"; with Napoleon Emperor, "Wilhelm Tell." The ten years in which
Schiller and Goethe lived in close friendship--the ten great years of
German poetry, on which the German will look back in distant centuries
with emotion and sentimental tenderness--are the same years in which a
loud cry of woe was heard through the air; in which the demons of
destruction drew together from all sides, with clothes dipped in blood,
and scorpion scourges in their hands, in order to make an end of the
unnatural life of a nation without a State. Only sixty years have since
passed, yet the period in which our fathers grew up is as strange to us
in many respects as the period in which, according to tradition,
Archimedes calculated geometrical problems, whilst the Romans were
storming his city. The movement of this time worked differently on the
Prussian State. It was no longer the Prussia of Frederic II. In the
interior, indeed, his regulations had been faithfully preserved; his
followers mitigated everywhere some severities of the old system, but
the great reforms which the time urgently required were scarcely begun.

But in the eighteenth century, up to the war of 1806, the external
boundary of the State increased on a gigantic scale. Frederic had still
left behind him a little kingdom; a few years after, Prussia might be
reckoned as one of the great realms of Europe. In the rapidity of this
growth, there was something unnatural. By the two last divisions of
Poland, about 1772 square miles of Sclavonic country were added.
Shortly before, the Principalities of the Franconian Hohenzollerns,
Anspach and Baireuth, were gained, another 115 square miles. Besides
this, after the peace of Luneville, forty-seven square miles of the
Upper Rhine district of Cleves were exchanged for 222 square miles of