"From Berlin the tenor of the news continues excellent. Vicky appears to go on pleasing, and being pleased. She is an extremely fortunate, animating, and tranquillising element in that region of conflict and indecision." And again: "Brunnow had reckoned upon Moustier from Berlin, whom he would have had in his pocket, and through him Walewski. Now he gets the Duke of Malakoff! He has not yet been able to realise the position, and is by way of being extremely confidential; it is he alone who has made Vicky's marriage popular in Berlin, where it was at first very unpopular, and he weeps tears of emotion when he speaks of her!" To the Princess herself he wrote also in March: "You seem to have taken up your position with much tact. The bandage has been torn from your eyes all at once as regards all the greatest mysteries of life, and you stand not only of a sudden before them, but are called upon to deal with them, and that too on the spur of the moment. 'Oh! It is indeed most hard to be a man,' was the constant cry of the old Würtemberg Minister, von Wangenheim, and he was right!" The Prince was generally philosophising, but even so the following, written a few days later, seems an extraordinary letter for any father to write to a girl not much over seventeen: "That you should sometimes be oppressed by home-sickness is most natural. This feeling, which I know right well, will be sure to increase with the sadness which the reviving spring, and the quickening of all nature that comes with it, always develop in the heart. It is a painful yearning, which may exist quite independently of, and simultaneously with, complete contentment and complete happiness. I explain this hard-to-be-comprehended mental phenomenon thus. The identity of the individual is, so to speak, interrupted; and a kind of Dualism springs up by reason of this, that the _I which has been_, with all its impressions, remembrances, experiences, feelings, which were also those of youth, is attached to a particular spot, with its local and personal associations, and appears to what may be called _the new I_ like a vestment of the soul which has been lost, from which nevertheless _the new I_ cannot disconnect itself, because its identity is in fact continuous. Hence the painful struggle, I might almost say the spasm, of the soul." To the faithful Stockmar the Prince confided his belief: "As to Vicky, unquestionably she will turn out a very distinguished character, whom Prussia will have cause to bless." The Prince's cherished scheme of a visit to Coburg began to take shape, and he writes: "My whole stay in Coburg can only be for six days. To see you and Fritz together in a quiet homely way without visits of ceremony, &c.--I dare not picture it to myself too strongly. Talk it over with Fritz, and let me know if I can count on you, but do not let the plan get wind, otherwise people will be paying us visits, and our meeting will lose its pleasant private character."