“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.”
Another letter, dated April 28, is interesting as showing that the Prince was beginning to perceive some of the difficulties in his daughter’s path:
“What you are now living through, observing, and doing, are the most important experiences, impressions and acts of your life, for they are the first of a life independent and responsible to itself. That outside of and in close proximity to your true and tranquillising happiness with dear Fritz your path of life is not wholly smooth, I regard as a most fortunate circumstance for you, inasmuch as it forces you to exercise and strengthen the powers of your mind.”
Nothing that concerned her but was of moment to her father: