“Oh! if you, with Fritz and the children, were only with us! Louis was an accession. He is a very dear good fellow, who pleases us better and better daily. In my abstraction I call him ‘Fritz.’ Your Fritz must not take it amiss, for it is only the personification of a beloved, newly-bestowed, full-grown son.
“But to return to the dear Christmas festival! Your gifts which were there have caused the highest delight, and those we have yet to expect will be looked for with impatience. To the latter belong Wilhelm’s bust, Fritz’s boar’s head—for which in the meantime I beg you will give the lucky huntsman my hearty thanks. Wilhelm shall be placed in the light you wish when he issues (I hope unbroken) from his dusty box. The album, which arrived yesterday morning, is very precious to us, as it enables us to live altogether beside you—in imagination.
“Prejudice walking to and fro in flesh and blood is my horror, and, alas, a phenomenon so common; and people plume themselves so much upon their prejudices, as signs of decision of character and greatness of mind, nay of true patriotism; and all the while they are simply the product of narrowness of intellect and narrowness of heart.”
CHAPTER VIII
DEATH OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA
ON January 2, 1861, died the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, and his brother, the Prince Regent, succeeded as William I. Prince Frederick William became Crown Prince of Prussia, and henceforth the Princess Royal was called, both in England and in Germany, the Crown Princess.
In the Letters of Queen Victoria there is a most impressive account, written by the Princess Royal, and there published for the first time, of the death of the King of Prussia. The event moved her the more deeply because, not only was she present at the death-bed, but it was really her first sight of death.
The King had been ailing so long that those about him had ceased to be specially anxious. On Monday evening, December 31, the Prince and Princess Frederick William were sitting at tea with the Prince Regent and the Princess of Prussia, when there was brought bad news from San Souci, but still nothing to make them particularly uneasy. In the middle of the night, or rather early next morning, they were called up with the intelligence that all hope for the King had been abandoned.
Without waiting for any kind of carriage, although, as the Princess notes, there were twelve degrees of cold Réaumur, she and Prince Frederick William hurried on foot to the Prince of Prussia’s palace. From thence they went in a special train to Potsdam. There they found the King dying, and the members of the Royal family standing round watching the death struggle. The painful scene went on till five the next afternoon, when Prince Frederick William wisely sent the Princess off to bed. At one o’clock in the morning of January 2 they were again called, with the news that the King had not many minutes more to live.
The letter in which all these facts are recorded is a remarkable composition, especially when it is remembered that the writer was only twenty. We may be sure that any thought of literary effect was far from her, and yet no one, reading it now after the lapse of so many years, can be insensible to the poignancy of this simple, unstudied, almost artless description of the scene in the death-chamber—the dim lamp; the silence broken only by the crackling of the fire and the death-rattle; the Queen, Elizabeth, continually wiping the perspiration from the dying man’s forehead.
But the letter also shows how really noble was the new Crown Princess’s outlook on life. She speaks with the warmest affection of her parents-in-law: “May God bless and preserve them, and may theirs be a long and happy reign,” and she goes on to describe the King as he lay dead, peaceful and quiet like a sleeping child. She could hardly bring herself to believe that this was really death, “that which I had so often shuddered at and felt afraid of”; there was nothing dreadful or appalling, only a heavenly calm and peace.