Nowhere is there so little religious formalism, coupled with such deep
religious feeling, as in the country where sermons are preached to
empty benches, while _Tannhauser_ and _Lohengrin, Wallenstein_ and
_Faust_, are listened to with the hush of awe and bated breath by
thousands upon thousands.

In all these respects--socially, intellectually, religiously--Bismarck
was the very incarnation of German character. Although an aristocrat
by birth and bearing, and although, especially during the years of
early manhood, passionately given over to the aristocratic habits of
dueling, hunting, swaggering and carousing, he was essentially a man
of the people. Nothing was so utterly foreign to him as any form of
libertinism; even his eccentricities were of the hardy, homespun sort.
He was absolutely free from social vanity; he detested court
festivities; he set no store by orders or decorations; the only two
among the innumerable ones conferred upon him which he is said to have
highly valued were the Prussian order of the Iron Cross, bestowed for
personal bravery on the battlefield, and the medal for "rescuing from
danger" which he earned in 1842 for having saved his groom from
drowning by plunging into the water after him.

All his instincts were bound up with the soil from which he had
sprung. He passionately loved the North German plain, with its gloomy
moorlands, its purple heather, its endless wheatfields, its kingly
forests, its gentle lakes, and its superb sweep of sky and clouds.
Writing to his friends when abroad--he traveled very little abroad--he
was in the habit of describing foreign scenery by comparing it to
familiar views and places on his own estates. During sleepless nights
in the Chancellery at Berlin there would often rise before him a
sudden vision of Varzin, his Pomeranian country-seat, "perfectly