nd less importance to
him, while his feeling for the great duties of his crown became ever
loftier and more passionate.

But just as his seven years' struggle in war may be called superhuman,
so now there was in his work something tremendous, which appeared to
his contemporaries sometimes more than earthly and sometimes inhuman.
It was great, but it was also terrible, that for him the prosperity of
the whole was at any moment the highest thing, and the comfort of the
individual so utterly nothing. When he drove out of the service with
bitter censure, in the presence of his men, a colonel whose regiment
had made a vexatious mistake on review; when in the swamp land of the
Netze he counted more the strokes of the 10,000 spades than the
sufferings of the workmen who lay ill with malarial fever in the
hospitals he had erected for them; when he anticipated with his
restless demands the most rapid execution, there was, though united
with the deepest respect and devotion, a feeling of awe among his
people, as before one whose being is moved by some unearthly power. He
appeared to the Prussians as the fate of the State, unaccountable,
inexorable, omniscient, comprehending the greatest as well as the
smallest. And when they told each other that he had also tried to
overcome Nature, and that yet his orange trees had perished in the
last frosts of spring, then they quietly rejoiced that there was a
limit for their King after all, but still more that he had submitted
to it with such good-humor and had taken off his hat to the cold days
of May.

With touching sympathy the people collected all the incidents of the
King's life which showed human feeling, and thus gave an intimate
picture of him. Lonesome as his house and garden were, the imagination
of his Prussians hovered incessantly around the consecrated place. If
any one on a warm moonlight night succeeded in getting into the
vicinity of the palace, he found the doors open, perhaps without a
guard, and he could see the great King sleeping in his room on a camp
bed. The fragrance of the flowers, the song of the night birds, the
quiet moonlight, were the only guards, almost the only courtiers of
the lonely man. Fourteen times the oranges bloomed at Sans Souci after
the acquisition of West Prussia--then Nature asserted her rights over
the great King. He died alone, with but his servants about him.

He had set out in his prime with an ambitious spirit and had wrested
from fate al