Such particulars of this meeting of king and poet as reached the ears of the public awakened feelings either of childish envy or childish indignation among the oppositionist writers of the day. It was considered that Herwegh ought (_à la_ Marquis Posa) to have taken advantage of the opportunity to demand political liberty for Prussia. A few days after the audience, Herwegh left Berlin. At Königsberg, where he was again entertained at a banquet, he was surprised to receive the news that his projected periodical, before its appearance, had been declared contraband in Prussia. It was a prohibition for which he might well have been prepared, for all books published abroad (his own poems included) were contraband, except those for which special licence had been granted. But already irritated by accusations of treason brought against him in one and another Radical newspaper, he was completely upset by this rebuff, and at once addressed an awkward, unmanly, would-be pathetic letter to the king. He pleaded the king's promise of honourable enmity, a promise which he declared to be broken by this prohibition; he would not ask the king to revoke this edict, though it was hard for him to see the child of his Muse menaced while yet in its mother's womb, and hard to have to live in a state of constant warfare with the law of the country; not that the prohibition did him any harm, for he was fortunate enough to be at that moment preparing the fifth edition of his poems, also a prohibited book; but he felt impelled to address a last, honest, impassioned appeal to the king; an appeal which, though private, was not merely his own, but that of thousands, &c, &c. The letter itself was stupid and indiscreet; its publication in a Leipzig newspaper a few weeks later was a piece of folly that avenged itself. In Stettin, Herwegh received orders to leave the country; policemen escorted him to the stage-coach, from which he was forbidden to alight in Halle. He had received a festive welcome in Prussia, but his leave-taking was of the coldest. The arch-scoffer Heine, in his poem, _Der Ex-lebendige_, has the following lines: "Aranchuez! in deinem Sand' Wie schnell die schönen Tage schwanden, Als ich vor König Philip stand Und seinen uckermarkschen Granden. Er hat mir Beifall zugenickt, Als ich gespielt den Marquis Posa, In Versen hab' ich ihn entzückt Doch ihm gefiel nicht meine Prosa."[7] [7] O my Aranchuez! how the days flew that I spent amidst thy sands! those days when I stood in the presence of King Philip and his Uckermark grandees. He nodded approval to me when I played Marquis Posa; my verses charmed him, but my prose he could not stand. And in _Die Audienz_ he jeers more mercilessly still at the Swabian suckling: "'Ich will, wie einst mein Heiland that, Am Anblick der Kinder mich laben. Lass zu mir kommen die Kindlein, zumal Das grosse Kind aus Schwaben.'