.

Pastor Sydow, who represented the Protestant clergy as the Prelate
Roland did the Catholics, and the Rabbi Dr. Sachs the Jews, afterwards
told me that the multitude of coffins, adorned with the rarest flowers
and lavishly draped with black, presented an image of mournful splendour
never to be forgotten, and I can easily believe it.

This funeral remains in my memory as an endless line of coffins and
black-garbed men with banners and hats bound with crape, bearing
flowers, emblems of guilds, and trade symbols. Mounted standard bearers,
gentlemen in robes--the professors of the university--and students in
holiday attire, mingled in the motley yet solemn train.

How many tears were shed over those coffins which contained the earthly
remains of many a young life once rich in hopes and glowing with warm
enthusiasm, many a quiet heart which had throbbed joyously for man's
noblest possession! The interment in the Friedrichshain, where four
hundred singers raised their voices, and a band of music composed of the
hautboy players of many regiments poured mighty volumes of sound
over the open graves of the dead, must have been alike dignified and
majestic.

But the opposition between the contending parties was still too great,
and the demand upon the king to salute the dead had aroused such anger
in my mother's circle, that she kept aloof from these magnificent and
in themselves perfectly justifiable funeral obsequies. It seemed almost
unendurable that the king had constrained himself to stand on the
balcony of the palace with his head bared, holding his helmet in his
hand, while the procession passed.

The effect of this act upon the loyal citizens of Berlin can scarcely be
described. I have seen men--even our humble Kurschner--weep during the
account of it by eye-witnesses.

Whoever knew Frederick William IV. also knew that neither genuine
reconciliation nor respect for the fallen champions of liberty induced
him to show this outward token of respect, which was to him the deepest
humiliation.

The insincerity of the sovereign's agreement with the ideas, events, and
men of his day was evident in the reaction which appeared only too
soon. His conviction showed itself under different forms, but remained
unchanged, both in political and religious affairs.

During the interval life had assumed a new aspect. The minority had
become the majority, and many a son of a strictly conservative man was
forbidden to oppose the "re