body turn in its coffin at the violation? It might well have been so,
for never was there fiercer hate. For three centuries the generations
have trooped hitherward, more often drawn in reverence, but sometimes
through very hatred, a multitude too mighty to be numbered. But there
is a grave in Prussia, where, if I mistake not, the pilgrims are
more numerous and the interest, for the average Prussian, deeper than
scholar or poet or reformer call out. The garrison church at Potsdam
has a plain name and is a plain edifice, when one thinks of the
sepulchre it holds. Hung upon the walls are dusty trophies; there are
few embellishments besides. You make your way through the aisles
among the pews where the regiments sit at service, marching from their
barracks close by, then through a door beneath the pulpit enter a
vault lighted by tapers along the wall. Two heavy coffins stand on the
stone floor,--the older one that of Frederick William I., that despot,
partially insane, perhaps, who yet accomplished great things for
Prussia; the other that of his famous son, Frederick the Great, whose
sword cut the path by which Prussia advanced to her vast power. On the
copper lid formerly lay that sword, until the great Napoleon when
he stood there, feeling a twinge of jealousy perhaps over the dead
leader's fame, carried it away with him. Father and son lie quietly
enough now side by side, though their relations in life were stormy.
About the great soldier's sleep every hour rolls the drumbeat from the
garrison close by. The tramp of the columns as they come in to worship
jar the warrior's ashes. The dusky standards captured in the Seven
Years' War droop about him. The hundred intervening years have
blackened them, already singed in the fire of Zorndorf, Leuthen, and
Torgau. The moth makes still larger the rent where the volleys passed.
The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs; and schooled as the
Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other
among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so