ay, 1772;"--Roden was on the
ground 4th June next; but, owing to Austrian delays, did not begin
till September 13th).]] a body of his best Official People into this
waste-howling scene, to set about organizing it. The Landschaften
(COUNTIES) were divided into small Circles; in a minimum of time, the
land was valued, and an equal tax put upon it; every Circle received its
LANDRATH, Law-Court, Post-office and Sanitary Police. New Parishes, each
with its Church and Parson, were called into existence as by miracle;
a company of 187 Schoolmasters--partly selected and trained by
the excellent Semler [famous over Germany, in Halle University and
SEMINARIUM, not yet in England]--were sent into the Country: multitudes
of German Mechanics too, from brick-makers up to machine-builders.
Everywhere there began a digging, a hammering, a building; Cities were
peopled anew; street after street rose out of the heaps of ruins; new
Villages of Colonists were laid out, new modes of agriculture ordered.
In the first Year after taking possession, the great Canal [of Bromberg]
was dug; which, in a length of fifteen miles, connects, by the Netze
River, the Weichsel with the Oder and the Elbe: within one year after
giving the order, the King saw loaded vessels from the Oder, 120 feet in
length of keel," and of forty tons burden, "enter the Weichsel. The vast
breadths of land, gained from the state of swamp by drainage into this
Canal, were immediately peopled by German Colonists.

"As his Seven-Years Struggle of War may be called super-human, so was
there also in his present Labor of Peace something enormous; which
appeared to his contemporaries [unless my fancy mislead me] almost
preternatural, at times inhuman. It was grand, but also terrible, that
the success of the whole was to him, at all moments, the one thing to be
striven after; the comfort of the individual of no concern at all. When,
in the Marshland of the Wetze, he counted more the strokes of the 10,000
spades, than the sufferings of the workers, sick with the marsh-fever in
the hospitals which he had built for them; [Compare PREUSS, iv. 60-71.]
when, restless, his demands outran the quickest performance,--there
united itself to the deepest reverence and devotedness, in his People,
a feeling of awe, as for one whose limbs are not moved by earthly life
[fanciful, considerably!]. And when Goethe, himself become an old man,
finished his last Drama [Second Part of FAUST], the figure of t