its
intellectual life deserve to be read with reverence by every German.
When you find him writing to Frau von Camas, "For the last six years I
have felt that it is the living, not the dead, for whom one should be
sorry," if you are shocked by the gloomy energy of his determination
you must beware of thinking that in it the power of this remarkable
spirit found its highest expression. It is true that the King had some
moments of desperation when he longed for death by the enemy's bullet
in order not to be forced to use the capsule which he carried in his
pocket. He was indeed fully determined not to ruin the State by living
as a captive of Austria; to this extent what he writes is terribly
true. But he was also of a poetic temperament, a child of the century
which so longed for great deeds and found such immense satisfaction in
the expression of exalted feelings. He was, to the bottom of his
heart, a German with the same emotional needs as, for instance, the
infinitely weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The consideration and
resolute expression of his final resolve made him freer and more
cheerful at heart. He wrote to his sister at Bayreuth about it in the
momentous second year of the war; and this letter is especially
characteristic, for his sister also was determined not to survive him
and the downfall of his house; and he approved this decision, to
which, by the way, he gave little attention in his gloomy satisfaction
at his own reflections. The two royal children had once secretly
recited, in the house of their stern father, the parts of French
tragedies; now their hearts beat again in the single thought of
freeing themselves by a Catonian death from a life full of
disappointment, confusion, and suffering. But when the excited and
nervous sister fell seriously ill, Frederick forgot all his Stoic
philosophy, and clinging fast to life with a passionate tenderness,
worried and mourned over her who was the dearest to him of his family.
When she died, his poignant grief was perhaps increased by the feeling
that he had interfered in too tragic a manner with a tender woman's
life. Thus, even in the greatest of all Germans born in the first half
of the eighteenth century, poetic feelings, and the wish to appear
beautiful and great, were strangely mingled with the serious realities
of life. Poor little Professor Semler who, while under the deepest
emotion, still studied his attitudes and worked over his polite
phrases, and