The letters of the man from whom Germany dates a new epoch in its intellectual life deserve to be read with reverence by every German. When you find him writing to Frau von Camas, "For the last six years I have felt that it is the living, not the dead, for whom one should be sorry," if you are shocked by the gloomy energy of his determination you must beware of thinking that in it the power of this remarkable spirit found its highest expression. It is true that the King had some moments of desperation when he longed for death by the enemy's bullet in order not to be forced to use the capsule which he carried in his pocket. He was indeed fully determined not to ruin the State by living as a captive of Austria; to this extent what he writes is terribly true. But he was also of a poetic temperament, a child of the century which so longed for great deeds and found such immense satisfaction in the expression of exalted feelings. He was, to the bottom of his heart, a German with the same emotional needs as, for instance, the infinitely weaker Klopstock and his admirers. The consideration and resolute expression of his final resolve made him freer and more cheerful at heart. He wrote to his sister at Bayreuth about it in the momentous second year of the war; and this letter is especially characteristic, for his sister also was determined not to survive him and the downfall of his house; and he approved this decision, to which, by the way, he gave little attention in his gloomy satisfaction at his own reflections. The two royal children had once secretly recited, in the house of their stern father, the parts of French tragedies; now their hearts beat again in the single thought of freeing themselves by a Catonian death from a life full of disappointment, confusion, and suffering. But when the excited and nervous sister fell seriously ill, Frederick forgot all his Stoic philosophy, and clinging fast to life with a passionate tenderness, worried and mourned over her who was the dearest to him of his family. When she died, his poignant grief was perhaps increased by the feeling that he had interfered in too tragic a manner with a tender woman's life. Thus, even in the greatest of all Germans born in the first half of the eighteenth century, poetic feelings, and the wish to appear beautiful and great, were strangely mingled with the serious realities of life. Poor little Professor Semler who, while under the deepest emotion, still studied his attitudes and worked over his polite phrases, and the great King, who in cool expectation of the hour of his death, still wrote of suicide in beautifully balanced periods--both were sons of the same age, in which pathos, which had not yet found worthy expression in art, luxuriated like climbing plants about the realities of life. But the King was greater than his philosophy. In reality he never lost his courage, nor the persistent, defiant vigor characteristic of the old Germans, nor the secret hope