across his
writing-table and with trembling hands tried to wrench from his neck
his order _Pour le Merite_. I can affirm without any exaggeration that
I could see him wasting away under the ceaseless moral blows dealt to
him, and that the mental torment he went through undoubtedly shortened
his life.

Queen Elizabeth was well aware of all, but she never took my action
amiss; she understood that I had to deliver the messages, but that it
was not I who composed them.

Queen Elizabeth was a good, clever and touchingly simple woman, not a
_poet qui court apres l'esprit_, but a woman who looked at the world
through conciliatory and poetical glasses. She was a good
conversationalist, and there was always a poetic charm in all she did.
There hung on the staircase a most beautiful sea picture, which I
greatly admired while the Queen talked to me about the sea, about her
little villa at Constanza, which, built on the extreme end of the
quay, seems almost to lie in the sea. She spoke, too, of her travels
and impressions when on the high seas, and as she spoke the great
longing for all that is good and beautiful made itself felt, and this
is what she said to me: "The sea lives. If there could be found any
symbol of eternity it would be the sea, endless in greatness and
everlasting in movement. The day is dull and stormy. One after another
the glassy billows come rolling in and break with a roar on the rocky
shore. The small white crests of the waves look as if covered with
snow. And the sea breathes and draws its breath with the ebb and flow
of the tide. The tide is the driving power that forces the mighty
waters from Equator to North Pole. And thus it works, day and night,
year by year, century by century. It takes no heed of the perishable
beings who call themselves lords of the world, who live only for a
day, coming and going and vanishing almost as they come. The sea
remains to work. It works for all, for men, for animals, for plants,
for without the sea there could be no organic life in the world. The
sea is like a great filter, which alone can produce the change of
matter that is necessary for life. In the course of a century
numberless rivers carry earth to the sea. Each river carries without
ceasing its burden of earth and sand to the ocean; and the sea
receives the load which is carried by the current far out to sea, and
slowly and by degrees in the course of time the sea dissolves or
crushes all it has received. No m