Olympian-Abysmal, in the music-chapel at Charlottenburg, while he
had the Ambrosian Song executed for him there, as the preliminary
step, was a loose myth; but the fact lying under it is abundantly
certain. Few Sons of Adam had more reason for a piously thankful
feeling towards the Past, a piously valiant towards the Future.
What king or man had seen himself delivered from such strangling
imbroglios of destruction, such devouring rages of a hostile world?
And the ruin worked by them lay monstrous and appalling all round.
Friedrich is now Fifty-one gone; unusually old for his age;
feels himself an old man, broken with years and toils; and here
lies his Kingdom in haggard slashed condition, worn to skin and
bone: How is the King, resourceless, to remedy it? That is now the
seemingly impossible problem. "Begin it,--thereby alone will it
ever cease to be impossible!" Friedrich begins, we may say, on the
first morrow morning. Labors at his problem, as he did in the march
to Leuthen; finds it to become more possible, day after day, month
after month, the farther he strives with it.

"Why not leave it to Nature?" think many, with the Dismal Science
at their elbow. Well; that was the easiest plan, but it was not
Friedrich's. His remaining moneys, 25 million thalers ready for a
Campaign which has not come, he distributes to the most
necessitous: "all his artillery-horses" are parted into plough-
teams, and given to those who can otherwise get none: think what a
fine figure of rye and barley, instead of mere windlestraws,
beggary and desolation, was realized by that act alone. Nature is
ready to do much; will of herself cover, with some veil of grass
and lichen, the nakedness of ruin: but her victorious act, when she
can accomplish it, is that of getting YOU to go with her
handsomely, and change disaster itself into new wealth. Into new