Romulus's She-Wolf, and the correggiosity of Correggio; and contain, for
instance, no Portrait of Frederick the Great; no Likenesses at all, or
next to none at all, of the noble series of Human Realities, or of
any part of them, who have sprung not from the idle brains of dreaming
Dilettanti, but from the Head of God Almighty, to make this poor
authentic Earth a little memorable for us, and to do a little work that
may be eternal there:--in those expensive Halls of "High Art" at Berlin,
there were, to my experience, few Pictures more agreeable than this of
Pesne's. Welcome, like one tiny islet of Reality amid the shoreless sea
of Phantasms, to the reflective mind, seriously loving and seeking
what is worthy and memorable, seriously hating and avoiding what is the
reverse, and intent not to play the dilettante in this world.

The same Pesne, an excellent Artist, has painted Friedrich as
Prince-Royal: a beautiful young man with MOIST-looking enthusiastic eyes
of extraordinary brilliancy, smooth oval face; considerably resembling
his Mother. After which period, authentic Pictures of Friedrich are
sought for to little purpose. For it seems he never sat to any
Painter, in his reigning days; and the Prussian Chodowiecki, [Pronounce
KODOV-YETSKI;--and endeavor to make some acquaintance with this
"Prussian Hogarth," who has real worth and originality.] Saxon Graff,
English Cunningham had to pick up his physiognomy from the distance,
intermittently, as they could. Nor is Rauch's grand equestrian Sculpture
a thing to be believed, or perhaps pretending much to be so. The
commonly received Portrait of Friedrich, which all German limners can
draw at once,--the cocked-hat, big eyes and alert air, reminding you of
some uncommonly brisk Invalid Drill-sergeant or Greenwich Pensioner, as
much as of a Royal Hero,--is nothing but a general extract and average
of all the faces of Friedrich, such as has been tacitly agreed upon;
and is definable as a received pictorial-myth, by no means as a fact, or
credible resemblance of life.

But enough now of Pictures. This of the Little Drummer, the painting and
the thing painted which remain to us, may be taken as Friedrich's first
appearance on the stage of the world; and welcomed accordingly. It is
one of the very few visualities or definite certainties we can lay hold
of, in those young years of his, and bring conclusively home to our
imagination, out of the waste Prussian dust-clouds of uninstruc