A treaty of peace was now about to be drawn up. Napoleon, the Emperor of Russia, and the King of Prussia, met in a grand ceremonial way at Tilsit. The Emperor of Russia was considered by Napoleon sufficiently powerful to be treated with flattery and consideration. The King of Prussia, being helpless, was harshly dealt with; and when the terms of the peace were discussed, Napoleon was inexorable in insisting on an almost complete destruction of the power of Prussia. All the principal fortified towns in Prussia, including Magdeburg, which commanded the Elbe, were to remain in the hands of the French; and the standing army of Prussia was to be limited to 42,000 men.

The idea appears to have occurred to the Emperor of Russia, that if Queen Louisa joined her husband at Tilsit she could induce Napoleon to modify these harsh conditions of peace. Frederick William concurred, and wrote to the Queen, requesting her immediate presence to intercede with Napoleon for more favourable terms. No wonder, when the King’s letter was placed in her hands, that the Queen burst into tears, and said it was the hardest thing she had ever been called upon to bear and do. All her woman’s pride revolted against humbling herself to beg for favours from the man who but the other day had so brutally insulted her. But she thought, how could she, who had urged her sons to die for their country, refuse to sacrifice her just and natural resentment for the same end? She set out without delay, and the famous interview between herself and Napoleon was speedily arranged. He now treated her with every outward mark of respect, and was perhaps surprised to find the fancy picture he had drawn of her, in his infamous bulletins, falsified in every particular. She would not allow him to trifle with her, and lead the conversation away to commonplaces, but went straight to the object which had brought her to Tilsit, the granting of moderate terms of peace to Prussia. She was calm, dignified, and courteous; once only her self-command failed her: “When she spoke of the Prussian people, and of her husband, she could not restrain her tears.” She begged the conqueror at least to grant to Prussia the possession of Magdeburg. The French minister, Talleyrand, who was present at the interview, thought that Napoleon wavered; but a tiger with a kid in his claws does not easily relinquish it, even if an archangel pleads with him. The interview was brought to an end, with no concession promised. The Queen and Emperor met again at a State banquet the same evening, and again the following day at a smaller private gathering. But she had humbled her pride in vain. Her first words after the final leavetaking were, “I have been cruelly deceived.” Napoleon did not hesitate to misrepresent to his wife, the Empress Josephine, the whole bearing of the Queen of Prussia to him: “She is fond of coquetting with me,” he wrote; “but do not be jealous.” But to Talleyrand, who could not be deceived, because he was present at Tilsit at all the interviews that had taken place between the two, Napoleon said, “I knew that I should see a beautiful woman, and a Queen with dignified manners, but I found the most admirable Queen, and at the same time the most interesting woman I had ever met with.” On another occasion he remarked to Talleyrand that the “Queen of Prussia attached too much importance to the dignity of her sex, and to the value of public opinion.” From a man of Napoleon’s gross and low estimate of womanhood, a greater compliment would be impossible.

The French army was withdrawn from Berlin in December 1808. The King and Queen of Prussia did not re-enter their capital till December 1809. In the following July, Louisa died. Spasms of the heart had come on, a short time previously, during the illness of one of her children. They returned with a violence which she had not strength to resist. Her husband and her people felt that she had died of a broken heart. The short-lived rejoicings that had greeted her return to Berlin were now changed into devotion to her memory, and to the cause of German patriotism with which her name will always be associated. The King, his children, and his subjects mourned her loss with unceasing fidelity and reverence. Four years after her death, Frederick William and his Russian allies crushed Napoleon’s army at the battle of Leipzig. On his return to Berlin, the King’s first thought was to lay the laurel wreath of victory on his wife’s tomb. Queen Louisa’s eldest son directed that his heart should be buried at the foot of his mother’s grave, and the same spot was also selected as the last resting-place of her second son, the Emperor William. It will long be remembered that it was here that the late Emperor, then King William of Prussia, knelt alone, in silent meditation and stern resolve, on the sixtieth anniversary of his mother’s death, just at the time of the outbreak of the war of 1870 between France and Germany.

She was only thirty-five years old when she died; but she was able to leave to her children and to her people a name that will be remembered and honoured as long as the German Empire lasts. Her tomb at Charlottenburg is one of the most beautiful monuments to the memory of the dead, which the world contains. The pure white marble statue of the Queen is by the sculptor Rauch, who knew her well, and honoured her as she deserved. Everything about the building is designed with loving care. The words chosen by the King, and placed over the entrance of the temple where the monument lies, are: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen: and have the keys of hell and of death.”

XVIII
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

“And were another childhood world my share,

I would be born a little sister there.”—George Eliot.

A hundred years ago England was particularly rich in great brothers and sisters. There were William and Caroline Herschel, Charles and Mary Lamb, and, perhaps, chief of all, William and Dorothy Wordsworth. These last were certainly the greatest as tested by the position of the brother in the world of literature. He won and maintained a place among the greatest of English poets; but the very greatness of the brother was the cause why the sister is known only as a tributary to his genius. It is not that his achievements dwarf hers by comparison; she made no conscious contribution to literature; she felt from the outset of their life together that he was capable of giving to his countrymen thoughts which the world would not willingly let die, and she deliberately suppressed in herself all cultivation of her own powers, save such as should contribute to support, sustain, and promote his. As Charles Lamb said of his own sister, “If the balance has been against her, it was a noble trade.” There is, however, much evidence that the balance was not against Dorothy Wordsworth. She did not sacrifice herself in vain. She chose to give up all independent cultivation of her own considerable poetic gifts, and also to renounce all hopes of love and marriage, for the sake of devoting her whole life to her brother, and of helping to a freer and nobler utterance the poet who has given us “The Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” “The Ode to Duty,” “The Happy Warrior,” and a host of songs and sonnets among the most beautiful in our language. The sister freely and generously gave, the brother freely and generously received, and freely and generously acknowledged the value of the gift. Over and over again, in prose and verse, Wordsworth acknowledges all that he owes to his sister; never more warmly than when, on the approach of old age, disease had laid its hand upon her, and the long accustomed support seemed likely to be withdrawn. When Coleridge and Dorothy lay prostrate under the stroke of sickness, Wordsworth wrote at the age of sixty-two: “He and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, with equal steps, along the path of sickness, I will not say towards the grave; but I trust towards a blessed immortality.” If Wordsworth, reviewing the past, could speak thus of his sister, it must be of interest to us to endeavour to discern what her influence over him was, and how their life together was passed.

William Wordsworth was born in 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, the second son of John Wordsworth, a lawyer and land-agent to the Earls of Lonsdale. Dorothy, her parents’ only girl, was twenty months younger than William, and the two children very early showed that close sympathy and tender affection for one another which is often the precious possession of happy family life. Only a few years were spent together by the brother and sister in this joyous playtime of life; but the happiness of this early time is recorded in several of Wordsworth’s poems, especially in the one where he speaks of his sister and their visit together to see the sparrow’s nest—

She looked at it and seemed to fear it;