with their castles, which are almost literally castles in the air, and
their river which is walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to
wine. But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to
prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical
than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany
was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary.
There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin. Stella said
that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle
had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who
had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who
saw what was their enemy: and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like
an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic
essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets: it is
proved by the more deadly fact that it did. The actual written poetry of
Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but
simply feeble--and French. Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier as
his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian blues; nor can there be any
wonder. His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was
the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first of men. No wonder he
looked at the rest of us with little hope.

But a stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England. Prussia,
plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and
strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had
rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the
two most important events were the Polish national revival, with which
Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably
coercionist; and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany
by the King of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered
by a free German Convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans: