HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA
Page: 28

now call them hers, or ever see them again.

This was the Konigsmark tragedy at Hanover; fast ripening towards
its catastrophe while little Friedrich Wilhelm was there. It has
been, ever since, a rumor and dubious frightful mystery to
mankind: but within these few years, by curious accidents (thefts,
discoveries of written documents, in various countries, and
diligent study of them), it has at length become a certainty and
clear fact, to those who are curious about it. Fact surely of a
rather horrible sort;--yet better, I must say, than was suspected:
not quite so bad in the state of fact as in that of rumor.
Crime enough is in it, sin and folly on both sides; there is
killing too, but NOT assassination (as it turns out); on the whole
there is nothing of atrocity, or nothing that was not accidental,
unavoidable;--and there is a certain greatness of DECORUM on the
part of those Hanover Princes and official gentlemen, a depth of
silence, of polite stoicism, which deserves more praise than it
will get in our times. Enough now of the Konigsmark tragedy;
[A considerable dreary mass of books, pamphlets, lucubrations,
false all and of no worth or of less, have accumulated on this
dark subject, during the last hundred and fifty years; nor has the
process yet stopped,--as it now well might. For there have now two
things occurred in regard to it FIRST: In the year 1847, a Swedish
Professor, named Palmblad, groping about for other objects in the
College Library of Lund (which is in the country of the Konigsmark
connections), came upon a Box of Old Letters,--Letters undated,
signed only with initials, and very enigmatic till well searched
into,--which have turned out to be the very Autographs of the
Princess and her Konigsmark; throwing of course a henceforth
indisputable light on their relation. SECOND THING: A cautious
exact old gentleman, of diplomatic habits (understood to be "Count
Von Schulenburg-Klosterrode of Dresden"), has, since that event,
unweariedly gone into the whole matter; and has brayed it
everywhere, and pounded it small; sifting, with sublime patience,
not only those Swedish Autographs, but the whole mass of lying