"1762, _May_.--I am passing through the school of patience; it is hard, tedious, terrible, indeed barbarous. I only help myself out of it by looking on the universe in general, as from a distant planet There everything appears to me infinitely small, and I pity my enemies for taking so much trouble about such trifles. Is this old age, is it reflection, is it reason? I regard all the events of life with far more indifference than formerly. If there is anything to be done for the welfare of the State, I can yet apply some strength to it; but, between ourselves, it is no longer with the fiery vehemence of my youth, nor the enthusiasm that then animated me. It is time that the war should come to an end, for my preachings become tedious, and my hearers will soon complain of me." To Frau von Camas he writes:--"You speak of the death of poor F----. Ah, dear mamma, for six years I have mourned more for the living than for the dead." Thus did the King write and grieve, but he held out; and any one who is startled by the gloomy energy of his resolves, must guard himself from thinking that these were the highest expressions of the powers of this wonderful mind. It is true that the King had moments of depression, when he desired death under the fire of the enemy rather than seek it from his own hand out of the phial which he carried about him. It is true that he was firmly determined not to bring destruction on his State by allowing himself to live as a prisoner of the Austrians. There was a fearful truth in all that he wrote; but he was of a poetic disposition; he was a child of the century, which had such a craving for great deeds, and took delight in the expression of exalted feelings; he was, to his heart's core, a German, with the same longings as the immeasurably weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The contemplation and decided utterance of this last resolve gave him inward freedom and cheerfulness. He wrote concerning it also to his sister of Baireuth, in the dismal second year of the war, and this letter is particularly characteristic;[19] for she also had decided not to outlive the fall of her house; and he approved this decision, to which, however, he paid little attention, being immersed in the gloomy satisfaction of his own reflections. Both these royal children had once secretly recited together the _roles_ of French tragedies in the strict parental house; now their hearts beat again in unison, both thinking of freeing themselves, by an antique death, from a life full of illusions, errors, and sufferings. But when the excited and nervous sister fell dangerously ill, Frederic forgot all his stoical philosophy, and, with a passionate tenderness that still clung to life, he fretted and grieved about her who was the dearest to him of his family; and when she died, his sorrow was, perhaps, more severe from feeling that he had enacted a tragic part in the tender life of the woman. Thus, strangely,