HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA
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to your bewildered sense it is as if no insight into the real
heart of Friedrich and his affairs were anywhere to be had.
Truth is, the Prussian Dryasdust, otherwise an honest fellow,
and not afraid of labor, excels all other Dryasdusts yet known;
I have often sorrowfully felt as if there were not in Nature,
for darkness, dreariness, immethodic platitude, anything
comparable to him. He writes big Books wanting in almost every
quality; and does not even give an INDEX to them. He has made of
Friedrich's History a wide-spread, inorganic, trackless matter;
dismal to your mind, and barren as a continent of Brandenburg
sand!--Enough, he could do no other: I have striven to forgive
him. Let the reader now forgive me; and think sometimes what
probably my raw-material was!--

Curious enough, Friedrich lived in the Writing Era,--morning of
that strange Era which has grown to such a noon for us;--and his
favorite society, all his reign, was with the literary or writing
sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the
others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real
light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have
managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere
epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they
have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his
Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally
destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of all.
So far as I have noticed, there was not, with the single exception
of Mirabeau for one hour, any man to be called of genius, or with
an adequate power of human discernment, that ever personally
looked on Friedrich. Had many such men looked successively on his
History and him, we had not found it now in such a condition.
Still altogether chaotic as a History; fatally destitute even of
the Indexes and mechanical appliances: Friedrich's self, and
his Country, and his Century, still undeciphered; very dark
phenomena, all three, to the intelligent part of mankind.

In Prussia there has long been a certain stubborn though planless
diligence in digging for the outward details of Friedrich's Life-