The Princess had a very wide knowledge of history. Her political opinions were independent, entirely free from party prejudice, and based on the principle she had imbibed from her father—that Princes exist for the welfare of their people.
Future generations must ever acknowledge how the Princess Alice throughout her life strove to fulfil the saying of her favorite hero in history, “the great Fritz” (Frederic the Great, in his “Anaimachiavell”): “The rulers of nations must set the example of virtue to the world.”
APPENDIX.
THE beautiful sketch which follows appeared in the Darmstädter Zeitung, dated “Christmas Eve, 1878”; and the annexed translation of it, by Sir Theodore Martin, appeared a few days afterward in the Times.
Long, long before daybreak on one of those gloomy December days of last week, an officer made his way hurriedly along the empty, silent streets of the capital. He was in full uniform, but its pomp and splendor were shrouded in a thick covering of crape, for he was afoot thus early to do duty by the bier of the beloved Princess. Desolate were the streets, as of a city of the dead; desolate as though tenanted only by the dead was the lordly palace to which he bent his steps. The sentinels at the great gate stood motionless, despite the severe cold, as if they feared to disturb the repose of death. Here, where the inhabitants of the capital used to see all astir with the busy, cheerful life inseparable from the residence of a reigning Prince; here, where in days but recently gone by children, blooming and beautiful, the country’s pride and the joy of their princely parents, gave animation to house and garden, all was silent and void; a deadly blast had swept over the till now so happy home. The country’s young, idolized mother had closed her beautiful eyes, closed them for evermore, after doing and enduring nobly, after tasting the bitterness of great earthly sorrow. Many long and woful days, many nights of even greater anguish, had she watched, trembled, and prayed by the couch of a husband sick unto death, and of five children beloved past telling. The sweet, youngest bud in the fair wreath of princely children, had been torn from her bleeding heart, and tears—scalding tears—for the sweet little May-blossom, which she had herself put to its last sleep under chaplets of flowers, flowed fast, as she folded her hands in gratitude, when the peril of death had passed over the heads of her husband and her other children. “Thus do we learn humility!” she said, with quivering lip, to a lady who stood beside her. “God has called for one life, and has given me back five for it; how, then, should I mourn?” And now, when, with fear and trembling, joy seemed about to enter once more into that heavily-stricken home, again the dark pinions of the Angel of Death were heard upon the air, and he bore away the truest of wives, the most loving of mothers, a sacrifice to duty fulfilled with the noblest forgetfulness of self. These were the thoughts with which the solitary wayfarer went upon his sorrowful way, and crossed the threshold of the chamber of death. With light step and whispered words the watchers by the dead whom he relieved withdrew.