I knew the father of your Rosalie; he was once at our house with the school-master Fassbender.
[Eric to Weidmann.]
Adams was ordered to work in the trenches, and a great number of negroes with him, but he would not take the pick in his hand; then Roland did what I once dissuaded him from doing, when he wanted to labor among the workmen at the castle. I think I told you about it. Now he joined the negroes and used his pick with them, and when I went to him once, as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead, I saw a light in the youth's eye, which said that the crown of human honor rests on the brow from which runs the sweat of toil.
Beginning this letter to you composes me, in the midst of the constant excitement of camp-life.
There is much discontent in the army; men are blaming Lincoln for maintaining a vacillating, uncertain policy, or, to say the least, for his extreme slowness.
I must leave it to Dr. Fritz, or rather to time, to prove the truth of his words when he says, Lincoln is not a genius, an individual towering above the mass; he is an average man, the exact exponent of the spirit of the people at its present stage of progress. He is not remarkably distinguished, but a man of just the right stamp.
Perhaps that is true, and it is much to say. This is not greatness in the old sense of the word, and we may have entered upon an age which has outgrown the heroic, and those representatives of heroism around whom all others seemed grouped as minor figures.
Opposed to the Monarchic, the Aristocratic, and the Monotheistic, stand the Republican, the Democratic, and the Pantheistic: they are only three different names for three unfoldings of the same principle.
[Roland to the Professorin.]
My first lines from camp shall be to you, dear Frau Professorin. I thank you for the motto which you once gave me; I feel as if I were not the same person to whom all that happened. I promise you, and this is a new oath of allegiance, to be true to your motto.