He wrote to his sister at Bayreuth about it in the
momentous second year of the war; and this letter is especially
characteristic, for his sister also was determined not to survive him
and the downfall of his house; and he approved this decision, to
which, by the way, he gave little attention in his gloomy satisfaction
at his own reflections. The two royal children had once secretly
recited, in the house of their stern father, the parts of French
tragedies; now their hearts beat again in the single thought of
freeing themselves by a Catonian death from a life full of
disappointment, confusion, and suffering. But when the excited and
nervous sister fell seriously ill, Frederick forgot all his Stoic
philosophy, and clinging fast to life with a passionate tenderness,
worried and mourned over her who was the dearest to him of his family.
When she died, his poignant grief was perhaps increased by the feeling
that he had interfered in too tragic a manner with a tender woman's
life. Thus, even in the greatest of all Germans born in the first half
of the eighteenth century, poetic feelings, and the wish to appear
beautiful and great, were strangely mingled with the serious realities
of life. Poor little Professor Semler who, while under the deepest
emotion, still studied his attitudes and worked over his polite
phrases, and the great King, who in cool expectation of the hour of
his death, still wrote of suicide in beautifully balanced
periods--both were sons of the same age, in which pathos, which had
not yet found worthy expression in art, luxuriated like climbing
plants about the realities of life.
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