and turn
out unexpectedly void of instruction to us. Small use in a talent of
writing, if there be not first of all the talent of discerning, of
loyally recognizing; of discriminating what is to be written! Books born
mostly of Chaos--which want all things, even an INDEX--are a painful
object. In sorrow and disgust, you wander over those multitudinous
Books: you dwell in endless regions of the superficial, of the nugatory:
to your bewildered sense it is as if no insight into the real heart
of Friedrich and his affairs were anywhere to be had. Truth is, the
Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow, and not afraid of labor,
excels all other Dryasdusts yet known; I have often sorrowfully felt
as if there were not in Nature, for darkness, dreariness, immethodic
platitude, anything comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in
almost every quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has
made of Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless
matter; dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg
sand!--Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive him.
Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what probably my
raw-material was!--

Curious enough, Friedrich lived in the Writing Era,--morning of that
strange Era which has grown to such a noon for us;--and his favorite
society, all his reign, was with the literary or writing sort. Nor have
they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and
about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his
existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed,
for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the
"picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country
and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally
destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of all. So far as
I have noticed, there was not, with the single exception of Mirabeau for
one hour, any man to be called of genius, or with an adequate power of
human discernment, that ever personally looked on Friedrich. Had many
such men looked successively on his History and him, we had not found it
now in such a condition. Still altogether chaotic as a History; fatally
destitute even of the Indexes and mechanical appliances: Friedrich's
self, and his Country, and his Century, still undeciphered; very dark
phenomena, all three, to the intelligent part of m