Thus it was possible that German officers, even the _gardes du corps_ at Potsdam, good-humouredly allowed the _ca ira_ to be played, whilst the street boys sang to it a rude translation of the text. The ladies of the German aristocracy wore tricolour ribbons, and head dresses _a la carmagnole_. Curiosity collected the people in a circle round some patriot prisoners of war--dismal tattered figures--whilst they danced their wild dances, and accompanied them by pantomime, which expressed washing their hands in the blood of the aristocrats; and some innocently bought from them the playthings which they had made on the march, little wooden guillotines. But it was a morbid simplicity in the educated. There is another thing which appears still stranger to us. Whilst the storm raged convulsively in France, and the flood rolled its waves more wildly every year over Germany; the eyes and hearts of all men of intellect were fixed on a little Principality in the middle of Germany, where, amid the deepest tranquillity, the great poet of the nation, by the wonderful creations of his mind in prose and verse, dispelled all dark forebodings. King and Queen were guillotined, and "Reineke Fuchs" made into a poem; there came, together with Robespierre and the reign of terror, letters on the aesthetic training of men; with the battles of Lodi and Arcole, "Wilhelm Meister," "Horen," and "Xenien"; with the French acquisition of Belgium, "Hermann and Dorothea"; with the French conquest of Switzerland and the States of the Pope, "Wallenstein"; with the French seizure of the left bank of the Rhine, the "Bastard of Orleans"; with the occupation of Hanover by Napoleon, the "Bride of Messina"; with Napoleon Emperor, "Wilhelm Tell." The ten years in which Schiller and Goethe lived in close friendship--the ten great years of German poetry, on which the German will look back in distant centuries with emotion and sentimental tenderness--are the same years in which a loud cry of woe was heard through the air; in which the demons of destruction drew together from all sides, with clothes dipped in blood, and scorpion scourges in their hands, in order to make an end of the unnatural life of a nation without a State. Only sixty years have since passed, yet the period in which our fathers grew up is as strange to us in many respects as the period in which, according to tradition, Archimedes calculated geometrical problems, whilst the Romans were storming his city. The movement of this time worked differently on the Prussian State. It was no longer the Prussia of Frederic II. In the interior, indeed, his regulations had been faithfully preserved; his followers mitigated everywhere some severities of the old system, but the great reforms which the time urgently required were scarcely begun.