"Passed away? Where? How passed away?"
"Dead, Herr Professor."
The heart of Max Brendel, though it had ceased to beat for the woman who represented to him the empress-fancy of his soul, did not, in one single moment, throw off its burden. It was with the sorrow we all feel for those whom we shall never behold again that he looked upon the corpse of the Glass Queen. She had gone away forever into the unknown land whence she had come: she had died out of the artist's life — his one dream of genius was dead, which had led him into many joys and many sins, and there remained to him henceforth only the homely love of the mortal woman for the mortal man.
. . . . . . . .
"And so ended," said Max Brendel when he first told Elsa the whole story, without gloss or reserve — "and so ended the dream of a charlatan."
She behoved every word — looking-glass and all. Had she not broken it with her own hands at the very hour when Max repented and the baroness died?
"And art thou happy — here in this quiet place, teaching and toiling? Dost thou never envy Adolf Meyer, in all his glory, and think how things might have been? Art thou quite happy, with only thy work and me?"
"Only with thee, Elsa? Only with all the universe!" said Max Brendel. "A short cut to glory, indeed! Thou mayst not believe in witchcraft, but that is the devil's road, all the same. I have more than all the glory I deserve. All comes at last to him who has courage, and hope, and truth, and —— "
"Patience!" said left-handed Elsa.
PRINCE BISMARCK AND HIS MASTER.
The two memoranda or confidential reports to the king just published by Prince Bismarck in the Reichsanzeiger have almost as much interest for the student of history as for the politician. It has always been believed that Prince Bismarck, like Richelieu, like Stein, like Marlborough, like Sir Robert Walpole, like, perhaps, most of the great statesmen of modern Europe, had always to maintain two equally difficult and simultaneous struggles, — one with external opponents, and one in the cabinet of his king. It is well known that the prince had the utmost difficulty in persuading his master into the war of 1866, into the dethronement of so many "legitimate" princes, into giving up Bohemia — which the king considered had twice been conquered by the Hohenzollems — and into the acceptance of the imperial crown. The king, on great occasions, has always yielded to the genius of his subject, but the struggle has often been severe, and Prince Bismarck, though always loyal, must have chafed fiercely from time to time under a restraint which, by keeping down his natural ύβρις and tendency to impulse, and by forcing him to think out every plan, has probably been one element in his success. He has stated at least once that "the conceit of kings is limitless;" he has confessed openly in Parliament that he detests the arrangement of the Prussian ministry, under which every minister deals directly with the sovereign, and the premier has no constitutional supervision over all; he has declared his resolve not to work under a similar system in Germany, and now he appears confessing that he has even in the empire a battle to fight over many details of his administration. He was in 1872 and 1873 chancellor of the empire and head of the foreign office, yet he sent in "reports" to the king, he himself being at Varzin, which are really complaints that he could not remove an ambassador to Paris whom he utterly distrusted. Whether he had grounds for distrusting Count Arnim or not, whether his furious charges were libels, as Count Arnim's friends would say, or are statements necessary to the conduct of serious business, as the chancellor's friends would say, or are, as we should be inclined to think, just objections exaggerated, and so to speak, poisoned, by personal hatred and contempt, will never be known while the emperor lives, and is not our point to-day. What is certain is that the all-powerful chancellor distrusted and hated his most important agent, distrusted him till he suspected him of grave suppressions of facts, hated him till he accused him of a character for habitual untruthfulness, and still was obliged to keep him on. He might, no doubt, have sent in his resignation, but then the king might have accepted it, and to a man brimming with a consciousness of exceptional competence for great affairs, and bursting with plans for the future, that risk may well have seemed too great to be
