ty "next year" either,--such
things having intervened;--nor the next year after that, for reasons
tragically good on the latter occasion!

These delays about the Double-Marriage Treaty are not a pleasing
feature of it to Friedrich Wilhelm; who is very capable of being hurt by
slights; who, at any rate, dislikes to have loose thrums flying about,
or that the business of to-day should be shoved over upon to-morrow. And
so Queen Sophie has her own sore difficulties; driven thus between
the Barbarians (that is, her Husband), and the deep Sea (that is, her
Father), to and fro. Nevertheless, since all parties to the matter
wished it, Sophie and the younger parties getting even enthusiastic
about it; and since the matter itself was good, agreeable so far
to Prussia and England, to Protestant Germany and to Heaven and
Earth,--might not Sophie confidently hope to vanquish these and other
difficulties; and so bring all things to a happy close?

Had it not been for the Imperial Shadow-huntings, and this rickety
condition of the celestial Balance! Alas, the outer elements interfered
with Queen Sophie in a singular manner. Huge foreign world-movements,
springing from Vienna and a spectre-haunted Kaiser, and spreading like
an avalanche over all the Earth, snatched up this little Double-Marriage
question; tore it along with them, reeling over precipices, one knew not
whitherward, at such a rate as was seldom seen before. Scarcely in
the Minerva Press is there record of such surprising, infinite and
inextricable obstructions to a wedding or a double-wedding. Time and
space, which cannot be annihilated to make two lovers happy, were here
turned topsy-turvy, as it were, to make four lovers,--four, or at the
very least three, for Wilhelmina will not admit she was ever the least
in love, not she, poor soul, either with loose Fred or his English
outlooks,--four young creatures, and one or more elderly persons,
superlatively wretched; and even, literally enough, to do all but kill
some of them.

What is noteworthy too, it proved wholly inane, this huge world-ocean of
Intrigues and Imperial Necromancy; ran dry at last into absolute nothing
even for the Kaiser, and might as well not have been. And Mother and
Father, on the Prussian side, were driven to despair and pretty nearly
to delirium by it; and our poor young Fritz got tormented, scourged, and
throttled in body and in soul by it, till he grew to loathe the light of
the sun, and in fac