During the first weeks which followed the receipt of the telegram announcing his death the Crown Princess fell into a silent, listless state, only rousing herself to bursts of grief which were terrible to witness. The simple religious faith to which her mother turned could not, unfortunately, bring her the same consolation. In her extremity it was on her husband that she leaned. He was untiringly patient and tender, though it must have been most painful for him to be told that she felt as if her life was over and she could never be happy again. It is surely true to say that in these difficult days the Crown Prince revealed the essential nobility of his character quite as much as he did in the great spectacular moments of his life--on the stricken field and in the glory of conquest. Many a husband would have shown a certain resentment at his wife's absorption in her father, but it is clear that the Crown Prince, far from feeling any such petty jealousy, brought his wife the truest consolation by understanding and himself sharing in her sorrow. He knew what a really remarkable man Prince Albert was, he had felt the charm of his personality and of his intellectual gifts; and so we find him looking back on this bereavement, in a letter written some months later to his old tutor, M. Godet: "Our whole life is, if such a thing be possible, increasing in happiness daily. All the tribulation, all the bitterness, of my outside life, and of what I may call my practical life, I am able to leave behind me when I reach the door which leads to my 'home.' We had the great grief of losing my dear father-in-law, the most intimate and tender friend of my wife, and to me a true second father. It came like a clap of thunder on our peaceful, happy life. We are now deprived of him whom we thought would help to guide us during many many years, and now the British Sovereign is bereft of her only help, while Europe is deprived of one of her most brilliant and most distinguished minds." It may reasonably be doubted whether to the Crown Princess the prolongation of her father's life would have been of great service. We cannot feel at all sure that in her critical relations with Bismarck, for instance, his counsel would always have been of the safest kind. He had not brought her up to be the wife of an autocratic sovereign, still less that of the wife of an Heir Apparent; she was brought up as might have been a Prince of Wales in a constitutional country. By an unfortunate irony of fate, all those who warmly and sincerely sympathised with the point of view of the Prince Consort, and of herself and the Crown Prince, were not Prussians; they were--in the phrase then generally used--Coburgers. This was pre-eminently the case with Stockmar, and in a less degree with Bunsen and other Liberal Germans. The mere fact that they were not Prussians discounted any value their opinions might otherwise have had, both with the then King of Prussia and with those who surrounded him.