ary entity by way of King; and the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children in a frightful and
tragical manner, little noticed in the Penny Newspapers and Periodical
Literatures of this generation. Oh, my friends--! But there is plain
Business waiting us at hand.

Chapter II.--REPAIRING OF A RUINED PRUSSIA.

That of Friedrich's sitting wrapt in a cloud of reflections
Olympian-Abysmal, in the music-chapel at Charlottenburg, while he had
the Ambrosian Song executed for him there, as the preliminary step, was
a loose myth; but the fact lying under it is abundantly certain. Few
Sons of Adam had more reason for a piously thankful feeling towards the
Past, a piously valiant towards the Future. What king or man had seen
himself delivered from such strangling imbroglios of destruction, such
devouring rages of a hostile world? And the ruin worked by them lay
monstrous and appalling all round. Friedrich is now Fifty-one gone;
unusually old for his age; feels himself an old man, broken with years
and toils; and here lies his Kingdom in haggard slashed condition, worn
to skin and bone: How is the King, resourceless, to remedy it? That is
now the seemingly impossible problem. "Begin it,--thereby alone will it
ever cease to be impossible!" Friedrich begins, we may say, on the
first morrow morning. Labors at his problem, as he did in the march to
Leuthen; finds it to become more possible, day after day, month after
month, the farther he strives with it.

"Why not leave it to Nature?" think many, with the Dismal Science
at their elbow. Well; that was the easiest plan, but it was not
Friedrich's. His remaining moneys, 25 million thalers ready for a
Campaign which has not come, he distributes to the most necessitous:
"all his artillery-horses" are parted into plough-teams, and given to
those who can otherwise get none: think what a fine figure of rye
and barley, instead of mere windlestraws, beggary and desolation, was
realized by that act alone. Nature is ready to do much; will of herself
cover, with some veil of grass and lichen, the nakedness of ruin: but
her victorious act, when she can accomplish it, is that of getting YOU
to go with her handsomely, and change disaster itself into new wealth.
Into new wisdom and valor, which are wealth in all kinds; California
mere zero to them, zero, or even a frightful MINUS quantity! Friedrich's
procedures in this matter I believe to be little less didactic than
those other, whi