eferring hopefully "to
Providence"): "Perform faithfully the given work on your side, as I on
mine; for the rest, let what you call 'Providence' decide as it
likes [UNE PROVIDENCE AVEUGLE? Ranke, who alone knows, gives "BLINDE
VORSEHUNG." What an utterance, on the part of this little Titan!
Consider it as exceptional with him, unusual, accidental to the hard
moment, and perhaps not so impious as it looks!]--Neither our prudence
nor our courage shall be liable to blame; but only circumstances that
would not favor us....

"I prepare myself for every event. Fortune may be kind or be unkind, it
shall neither dishearten me nor uplift me. If I am to perish, let it
be with honor, and sword in hand. What the issue is to be--Well, what
pleases Heaven, or the Other Party (J'AI JETE LE BONNET PAR DESSUS LES
MOULINS)! Adieu, my dear Podewils; become as good a philosopher as
you are a politician; and learn from a man who does not go to Elsner's
Preaching [fashionable at the time], that one must oppose to ill fortune
a brow of iron; and, during this life, renounce all happiness, all
acquisitions, possessions and lying shows, none of which will follow us
beyond the grave." [Ranke, iii. pp. 238-241.]

"By what points the Austrian-Saxon Armament will come through upon us?
Together will it be, or separately? Saxons from the Lausitz, Austrians
from Bohmen, enclosing us between two fires?"--were enigmatic questions
with Friedrich; and the Saxons especially are an enigma. But that come
they will, that these Pandours are their preliminary veiling-apparatus
as usual, is evident to him; and that he must not spend himself upon
Pandours; but coalesce, and lie ready for the main wrestle. So that from
April 28th, as above noticed, Friedrich has gone into cantonments, some
way up the Neisse Valley, westward of Neisse Town; and is calling in his
outposts, his detachments; emptying his Frontier Magazines;--abandoning
his Upper-Silesian Frontier more and more, and in the end altogether, to
the Pandour hordes; a small matter they, compared to the grand Invasion
which is coming on. Here, with shiftings up the Neisse Valley, he
lies till the end of May; watching Argus-like, and scanning with every
faculty the Austrian-Saxon motions and intentions, until at length they
become clear to him, and we shall see how he deals with them.

His own lodging, or head-quarter, most of this time (4th May-27th
May), is in the pleasant Abbey of Camenz (mythic scene of