This love and appreciation of nature and child-life always remained characteristic of her. With so many duties and demands upon her, she was obliged to take a few hours’ rest daily to refresh her spirit and renew her strength. This repose she found most readily in the solitude and beauty of nature. “If I neglect this hour for collecting my forces,” she once remarked, “I am out of sorts and cannot endure the confusion of the world. Oh, what a blessing it is to be able to commune with our souls!” It is evident that one of such deep emotional nature, at such times did not merely lose herself in dreams or ponder idly on her own affairs. She had been accustomed from childhood to collect and assimilate the best that human art and science have to offer. In proof of this, we have her essays, journals, and letters. The works of the great poets, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and others, were her companions and the springs of her spiritual and mental refreshment, next to music, which she loved to cultivate. She interpreted the songs of her country with a voice full of feeling. But alas! there were hours in store for her, when all that genius has to offer could not still the suffering of her heart! The first hour of trial came when her brother-in-law, Prince Louis, died of typhoid fever, December 28, 1796, leaving her sister Frederika an eighteen-year-old widow. She was married a second time, in 1798, to Prince Frederick William of Braunfels; and after he died, in 1814, she became the bride of the English Prince Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, and as such, Queen of Hanover, in 1837. A fortnight after Prince Louis’s death (January 13, 1797) the widow of Frederick the Great, the unhappy Queen Elizabeth Christine, whom Louise had regarded with tender and filial reverence, passed away in her eighty-second year. “It will be my turn next,” said the King, on receiving the news of her death. Two months after this, on the twenty-second of March, 1797, Louise bore her second son, Prince William, and on the sixteenth of November of the same year, the King’s prophecy was fulfilled. Frederick William the Second died; his eldest son ascended the throne, and Louise was Queen of Prussia. What a change in so short a time! Chapter III Louise as Queen