invading Schlesien from the Austrian side; if for nothing else
conceivable! The small riddle reads itself to him so, with a
painful flash of light. [ OEuvres de Frederic,
iii. 34.] Looking intensely into this matter, and putting things
together, Friedrich gets more and more the alarming assurance of
the fate intended him; and that he will verily have to draw sword
again, and fight for Silesia, and as if for life. From about the
end of 1743 (as I strive to compute), there was in Friedrich
himself no doubt left of it; though his Ministers, when he
consulted them a good while afterwards, were quite incredulous, and
spent all their strength in dissuading a new War; now when the only
question was, How to do said War? "How to do it, to make ready for
doing it? We must silently select the ways, the methods: silent,
wary,--then at last swift; and the more like a lion-spring, like a
bolt from the blue, it will be the better!" That is Friedrich's
fixed thought.

The Problem was complicated, almost beyond example. The Reich, with
a Kaiser reduced to such a pass, has its potentialities of help or
of hindrance,--its thousand-fold formulas, inane mostly, yet not
inane wholly, which interlace this matter everywhere, as with real
threads, and with gossamer or apparent threads,--which it is
essential to attend to. Wise head, that could discriminate the dead
Formulas of such an imbroglio, from the not-dead; and plant himself
upon the Living Facts that do lie in the centre there! "We cannot
have a Reichs Mediation-Army, then? Nor a Swabian-Franconian Army,
to defend their own frontier?" No; it is evident, none. "And there
is no Union of Princes possible; no Party, anywhere, that will rise
to support the Kaiser whom all Germany elected; whom Austria and
foreign England have insulted, ruined and officially designated as