ude thanks to God for having placed you at my
side at a decisive moment, and thus opened up a career for my
Government far exceeding thought and comprehension. You also will send
up your feelings of thankfulness that God graciously permitted you to
accomplish such great things. Both in and after all your labors you
always found comfort and peace in your home, and that gives you
strength in your difficult vocation. To preserve and strengthen you
for this is my constant solicitude, and I am glad to learn from your
letter through Count Lehndorff and also from the latter himself that
you will now think more of yourself than of the documents.

In remembrance of your silver wedding a vase will be handed you which
represents a grateful Borussia and which, fragile though the material
of which it is composed may be, shall one day express even in every
fragment what Prussia owes to you in its elevation to the height on
which it now stands.

Your truly devoted grateful King

WILHELM.

* * * * *

BISMARCK TO EMPEROR WILLIAM I.

Varzin, August I, '72.

Your Majesty greatly gladdened my wife and me by graciously evincing
sympathy in our family festival, and will, we trust, be graciously
pleased to accept our respectful thanks.

Your Majesty justly emphasizes happiness in the home as being among
the chief blessings for which I have to thank God, but part of the
happiness in my house, for my wife as well as for myself, comes from
the consciousness of your Majesty's satisfaction, and the exceedingly
gracious and kindly words of appreciation which your Majesty's letter
contains are more beneficial to afflicted nerves than is all medical
assistance. In looking back over my life I have such inexhaustible
cause to thank God for His unmerited mercy, that I often fear
everything will not go so well with me until the end. I recognize it
as an especially happy dispensation that God has called me on earth to
the service of a master whom I serve joyfully and with love, as the
innate fidelity of the subject never has to fear, under your Majesty's
leadership, coming into conflict with a warm feeling for the honor and
the welfare of the Fatherland. May God further give me strength to
carry out the will so to serve your Majesty that I obtain the
sovereign satisfaction, of which such a gracious testimony lies before
me today in the form of the autograph letter of the 26th. The vase,
which arrived in good time,