l weather, as warm as summer, and the vast escort which
accompanied the two hundred coffins of the champions of freedom to their
last resting-place seemed endless. We were forbidden to go on the
platform in front of the Neuenkirche where they were placed, but the
spectacle must have produced a strange yet deeply pathetic impression.

Pastor Sydow, who represented the Protestant clergy as the Prelate Roland
did the Catholics, and the Rabbi Dr. Sachs the Jews, afterwards told me
that the multitude of coffins, adorned with the rarest flowers and
lavishly draped with black, presented an image of mournful splendour
never to be forgotten, and I can easily believe it.

This funeral remains in my memory as an endless line of coffins and
black-garbed men with banners and hats bound with crape, bearing flowers,
emblems of guilds, and trade symbols. Mounted standard bearers, gentlemen
in robes--the professors of the university--and students in holiday
attire, mingled in the motley yet solemn train.

How many tears were shed over those coffins which contained the earthly
remains of many a young life once rich in hopes and glowing with warm
enthusiasm, many a quiet heart which had throbbed joyously for man's
noblest possession! The interment in the Friedrichshain, where four
hundred singers raised their voices, and a band of music composed of the
hautboy players of many regiments poured mighty volumes of sound over the
open graves of the dead, must have been alike dignified and majestic.

But the opposition between the contending parties was still too great,
and the demand upon the king to salute the dead had aroused such anger in
my mother's circle, that she kept aloof from these magnificent and in
themselves perfectly justifiable funeral obsequies. It seemed almost
unendurable that the king had constrained himself to stand on the balcony
of the palace with his head bared, holding his helmet in his hand, while
the procession passed.

The effect of this act upon the loyal citizens of Berlin can scarcely be
described. I have seen men--even our humble Kurschner--weep during the
account of it by eye-witnesses.

Whoever knew Frederick William IV. also knew that neither genuine
reconciliation nor respect for the fallen champions of liberty induced
him to show this outward token of respect, which was to him the deepest
humiliation.

The insincerity of the sovereign's agreement with the ideas, events, and
men of his day was evident