impatient of tedious preliminaries and investigations,--especially
of MAPS, which are the indispensablest requisite of all. A thing,
in short, that belongs peculiarly to soldier-students; who can
undergo the dull preliminaries, most dull but most inexorably
needed; and can follow out, with watchful intelligence, and with a
patience not to be wearied, the multifarious topographies, details
of movements and manoeuvrings, year after year, on such a Theatre
of War. What is to be done with it here! If we could, by
significant strokes, indicate, under features true so far as they
went, the great wide fire-flood that was raging round the world;
if we could, carefully omitting very many things, omit of the
things intelligible and decipherable that concern Friedrich
himself, nothing that had meaning: IF indeed--! But it is idle
preluding. Forward again, brave reader, under such conditions as
there are!

Friedrich's Winter in Breslau was of secluded, silent, sombre
character, this time; nothing of stir in it but from work only:
in marked contrast with the last, and its kindly visitors and
gayeties. A Friedrich given up to his manifold businesses, to his
silent sorrows. "I have passed my winter like a Carthusian monk,"
he writes to D'Argens: "I dine alone; I spend my life in reading
and writing; and I do not sup. When one is sad, it becomes at last
too burdensome to hide one's grief continually; and it is better to
give way to it by oneself, than to carry one's gloom into society.
Nothing solaces me but the vigorous application required in steady
and continuous labor. This distraction does force one to put away
painful ideas, while it lasts: but, alas, no sooner is the work
done, than these fatal companions present themselves again, as if
livelier than ever. Maupertuis was right: the sum of evil does