CHAPTER III.
THE DAYS OF MARCH.
[1848.]
Rest at Home.—Contemplation.—The Revolution in Paris, February, 1848.—Progress of the Revolutionary Spirit.—The March Days of Berlin.—The Citizen Guard.—Opening of the Second Session of the United Diet, 2d April, 1848.—Prince Solms-Hohen-Solms-Lich.—Fr. Foerster.—“Eagle’s Wings and Bodelswings.”—Prince Felix Lichnowsky.—The Debate on the Address.—Speech of Bismarck.—Revolution at the Portal of the White Saloon.—Vaticinium Lehninense.—The Kreuzzeitung Letter of Bismarck on Organization of Labor.—Bismarck at Stolpe on the Baltic.—The Winter of Discontent.—Manteuffel.
In a previous section we have already recorded that, shortly after the close of the First United Diet, on the 28th of July, 1847, Herr Otto von Bismarck celebrated his wedding at Reinfeld, in Pomerania, with Fräulein Johanna von Putkammer, and then entered upon a journey with his youthful wife by way of Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Salzburg, to Italy, meeting his sovereign, Frederick William IV., at Venice, and finally, returning through Switzerland and the Rhine-Province, fixed his residence at the ancient hearth of his ancestors at Schönhausen.
It was a short but happy time of rest, passed in rural retirement. The ancient family traits of the Bismarcks, after a silent activity in field and forest, became more strongly marked in him than in many other branches of his race, and his wife also retained a charming reminiscence of these peaceful days in Schönhausen. She still preserves grateful recollections of that happy time. The outward honors, the universal fame of her illustrious husband, have brought no accession of domestic joy; she loves the time in which she was only Frau von Bismarck, without the Excellency.
COUNTESS VON BISMARCK-SCHÖNHAUSEN.
It is not necessary to say that Bismarck, in the happiness of his youthful marriage, had not forgotten his native land; that he still pursued the course of political events with keen appreciation, and could not omit to join in its most serious eventualities. Whether he sat in his library amidst his books and maps, roved as a solitary sportsman through his preserves in field or wood, turned to agricultural pursuits with the eye of a proprietor, or visited his neighbors in Jerichow or Kattenwinkel, he felt an intuitive perception of some great and decisive event about to come. Men so politically eminent as Bismarck even then was—although he had not, as yet, evinced it in public—bear within them a certain foreshadowing of coming events not to be under-estimated.