My last sight of his Imperial Highness was on one of the latest occasions of his public appearance in Berlin while in health, in connection with one of those opportunities of hearing grand music in which this city excels the rest of the world. It was that most devotional music ever written,—Bach's Passion Music, rendered once a year, on the evening of Good Friday, in the Sing Akademie of Berlin. There was a trained chorus of about four hundred voices, with the best orchestra in the city, besides solo singers of repute,—one, a charming alto from Cologne. The simple and touching narrative of the Betrayal and the Crucifixion was sung as it is written in the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh chapters of Matthew, certain phrases and sentences repeated and adapted to the music, but none of it essentially changed in form. One of the bass soloists took, with the tenor, the soprano and the alto alternating, most of the narrative; and another bass solo took the words of Jesus, whenever these occur in the sad story. The arias and recitatives were finely given, but no effect was comparable to that of the grand chorus. The single word "Barabbas!" sung, or rather shouted, by these hundreds of voices in perfect time and tune, was overwhelming. Another passage of most thrilling effect was that in which every instrument and every voice joined in the deafening but harmonious description of the multitude who went out with swords and staves in the midnight, to take the unoffending Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. And one could almost hear in the music the sobbing of Peter when, after his denial of the Lord, "he went out and wept bitterly." Another most touching passage was that representing the love of the woman who anointed the feet of Jesus. When the shout of the multitude arose in the words "Crucify Him!" the awfulness was intense. There were times when the audience scarcely seemed to breathe freely, so strong was the spell, so vivid the reality of this saddest and most touching of narratives, as interpreted by this wonderful music. Never but once have I heard the perfection of choral music. It was one of the grand and solemn ancient hymn-tunes which are introduced at certain stages of this composition. I closed my eyes to the brilliance of the scene before me, that the ear might be the sole avenue of impression. Not the slightest jar or dissonance revealed any difference in the four hundred voices speaking as one; there seemed but one great soul pouring forth the vast volume of the harmony. The mighty cadences rose and fell, breaking in waves of sound against walls and roof, and must have floated far out into the night, now soaring in triumph, now sweet and soft and low as the tones of an Eolian harp; but the voice of hundreds was only as the voice of one. Three hours and more, with one brief intermission, we listened, and lived as it were those last sad hours of the Life so sacred and so majestic, so unutterably full of love. The end came, when the stone was rolled against the sealed door of the sepulchre, and the Roman watch was set. No hint of a resurrection was in the music; but the singers sang, in closing, again and again, in varying strains, "Good-night, good-night, dear Jesus!"
The audience, moved as it seemed by a common impulse, joined in that last song. The Crown Prince, with the Crown Princess and their daughters, and the Princess Christian, then on a visit to Berlin, were in the royal box in the concert-room. With his family and his royal visitors, Frederick, his voice already in the penumbra of a dim, unknown, unforeseen, but fateful shadow, took up the strain. "He sang it through," said a friend to me, who knew him well, "and I could see that he was deeply touched." There we left the story, as almost nineteen hundred years ago it was left, on that Friday evening in Jerusalem, with the full light of the Paschal moon falling on the closed and silent tomb, in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea.
Two days later, on the evening of Easter Sunday, the Crown Prince united in the service of the English Church, with his family, in celebrating the joyous anniversary of a sure resurrection, and during the same week left Berlin in quest of rest and health. He came not back until, before another Good Friday, "Unser Fritz" was Emperor of Germany, and already walking through the Valley of that Shadow in which he sorrowfully sung of his "dear Jesus," one short year before.
Various estimates have been made of the talents and character of the third of the three German Emperors of the year 1888, but the record and the proof of all prophecies concerning William II. have yet to be made. As Prince William we saw him with best opportunity in the Imperial box at the Reichstag, where for three hours he listened intently to the speeches of Bismarck, Von Moltke, and others. A fair young man, in the heavily ornamented light blue uniform of his regiment, to a casual observer his countenance bore neither the marks of dissipation nor the signs of intellectual power and force of character. But he was only in the late twenties, and "there is time yet." He is the idol of the army, and the devoted friend of Bismarck. Not one of all the great concourse of dignitaries at the celebration of the ninetieth birthday of William I. received such shouts of adulation from the populace as those which rent the air when the State carriage passed which bore the Prince and Princess William and their three little sons. Of the Princess William, now Empress Augusta Victoria, there was but one opinion. "None will ever know the blessing which the Princess William has been to our family," once said her father-in-law, the Crown Prince Frederick. From the throne to the hut, blessings followed her, a Christian lady, in faithfulness as wife, mother, friend, and princess, worthy of her exalted place. At a lawn-party given for the benefit of the Young Men's Christian Association, in the magnificent old park of the War Department in the heart of Berlin, Prince and Princess William were present. The Princess walked up and down, chatting now with one lady, now with another, in attire so simple that the plainest there could feel no unpleasant contrast, and in manner so beautiful and genial that we could forget the princess in admiration of the unassuming lady.
Of the Empress Frederick much has been said, and much invented, since the days when she left England, a bride of seventeen, to make her home in a foreign land.
"Is the Crown Princess popular?" I said to a young German lady, in the early days of our residence in Berlin.
"Not very."
"She is strong-minded, is she not?"