the trouble possible to make his notion of the
matter acceptable, skeptical as Serlo showed himself regarding it. "Well
then," said the latter finally, "suppose we grant you all this, what
will you explain by it?"

"Much, everything," said Wilhelm. "Conceive a prince such as I have
painted him, and that his father suddenly dies. Ambition and the love of
rule are not the passions that inspire him. As a king's son, he would
have been contented; but now he is first constrained to consider the
difference which separates a sovereign from a subject. The crown was not
hereditary; yet a longer possession of it by his father would have
strengthened the pretensions of an only son, and secured his hopes of
the succession. In place of this, he now beholds himself excluded by his
uncle, in spite of specious promises, most probably forever. He is now
poor in goods and favor, and a stranger in the scene which from youth he
had looked upon as his inheritance. His temper here assumes its first
mournful tinge. He feels that now he is not more, that he is less, than
a private nobleman; he offers himself as the servant of every one; he is
not courteous and condescending, he is needy and degraded.

"His past condition he remembers as a vanished dream. It is in vain that
his uncle strives to cheer him, to present his situation in another
point of view. The feeling of his nothingness will not leave him.

"The second stroke that came upon him wounded deeper, bowed still more.
It was the marriage of his mother. The faithful tender son had yet a
mother, when his father passed away. He hoped in the company of his
surviving, noble-minded parent, to reverence the heroic form of the
departed; but his mother too he loses, and it is something worse than
death that robs him of her. The trustful image which a good child loves
to form of its parents is gone. With the dead there is no help; on the
living no hold. She also is a woman, and her name is Frailty, like that
of all her sex.

"Now first does he feel himself completely bent and orphaned; and no
happiness of life can repay what he has lost. Not reflective or
sorrowful by nature, reflection and sorrow have become for him a heavy
obligation. It is thus that we see him first enter on the scene. I do
not think that I have mixed aught foreign with the piece, or overcharged
a single feature of it."

Serlo looked at his sister and said, "Did I give thee a false picture of
our friend? He begins well;