best French quality, found a home there; made "waste
sands about Berlin into potherb gardens;" and in spiritual
Brandenburg, too, did something of horticulture which is
still noticeable.

Now read carefully the description of the man, p. 352 (224-5); the story
of the battle of Fehrbellin, "the Marathon of Brandenburg," p. 354
(225); and of the winter campaign of 1679, p. 356 (227), beginning with
its week's marches at sixty miles a day; his wife, as always, being with
him;

Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt to our William of
Orange, who trimmed up her own "Orange-burg"
(country-house), twenty miles north of Berlin, into a little
jewel of the Dutch type, potherb gardens, training-schools
for young girls, and the like, a favorite abode of hers when
she was at liberty for recreation. But her life was busy and
earnest; she was helpmate, not in name only, to an ever busy
man. They were married young; a marriage of love withal.
Young Friedrich Wilhelm's courtship; wedding in Holland; the
honest, trustful walk and conversation of the two sovereign
spouses, their journeyings together, their mutual hopes,
fears, and manifold vicissitudes, till death, with stern
beauty, shut it in; all is human, true, and wholesome in it,
interesting to look upon, and rare among sovereign persons.

Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before her husband, who married
again--(little to his contentment)--died in 1688; and Louisa's second
son, Friedrich, ten years old at his mother's death, and now therefore
thirty-one, succeeds, becoming afterwards Friedrich I. of Prussia.

And here we pause on two great questions. Prussia is assuredly at this
point a happier and better country than it was, when inhabited by Wends.
But is Friedrich I. a happier and better man than Henry the Fowler? Have
all these kings thus improved their country, but never themselves? Is
this somewhat expensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I. buttoned in
diamonds, indeed the best that Protestantism can produce, as against
Fowlers, Bears, and Red Beards? Much more, Friedrich Wilhelm, orthodox
on predestination; most of all, his less orthodox son;--have we, in
these, the highest results which Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the
present, in the first circles of society? And if not, how is it that the
country, having gained so much in intelligence and strength, lies more
passively in