Readers are impatient to have done with these miscellaneous preludings, and to be once definitely under way, such a Journey lying ahead. Yes, readers; a Journey indeed! And, at this point, permit me to warn you that, where the ground, where Dryasdust and the Destinies, yield anything humanly illustrative of Friedrich and his Work, one will have to linger, and carefully gather it, even as here. Large tracts occur, bestrewn with mere pedantisms, diplomatic cobwebberies, learned marine-stores, and inhuman matter, over which we shall have to skip empty-handed: this also was among the sad conditions of our Enterprise, that it has to go now too slow and again too fast; not in proportion to natural importance of objects, but to several inferior considerations withal. So busy has perverse Destiny been on it; perverse Destiny, edacious Chance;--and the Dryasdusts, too, and Nightmares, in Prussia as elsewhere, we know how strong they are! Friedrich's character in old age has doubtless its curious affinities, its disguised identities, with these prognostic features and indications of his youth: and to our readers,--if we do ever get them to the goal, of seeing Friedrich a little with their own eyes and judgments,--there may be pleasant contrasts and comparisons of that kind in store, one day. But the far commoner experience (which also has been my own),--here is Smelfungus's stern account of that:-- "My friend, you will be luckier than I, if, after ten years, not to say, in a sense, twenty years, thirty years, of reading and rummaging in those sad Prussian Books, ancient and new (which often are laudably authentic, too, and exact as to details), you can gather any character whatever of Friedrich, in any period of his life, or conceive him as a Human Entity at all! It is strange, after such thousand-fold writing, but it is true, his History is considerably unintelligible to mankind at this hour; left chaotic, enigmatic, in a good many points,--the military part of it alone being brought to clearness, and rendered fairly conceivable and credible to those who will study. And as to the Man himself, or what his real Physiognomy can have been--! Well, it must be owned few men were of such RAPIDITY of face and aspect; so difficult to seize the features of. In his action, too, there was such rapidity, such secrecy, suddenness: a man that could not be read, even by the candid, except as in flashes of lightning. And then the anger of by-standers, uncandid, who got hurt by him; the hasty malevolences, the stupidities, the opacities: enough, in modern times, what is saying much, perhaps no man's motives, intentions, and procedure have been more belied, misunderstood, misrepresented, during his life. Nor, I think, since that, have many men fared worse, by the Limner or Biographic class, the favorable to him and the unfavorable; or been so smeared of and blotched of, and reduced to a mere blur and dazzlement of cross-lights,