Frederick the Great, whose sword cut the path by which Prussia advanced to her vast power.  On the copper lid formerly lay that sword, until the great Napoleon when he stood there, feeling a twinge of jealousy perhaps over the dead leader’s fame, carried it away with him.  Father and son lie quietly enough now side by side, though their relations in life were stormy.  About the great soldier’s sleep every hour rolls the drumbeat from the garrison close by.  The tramp of the columns as they come in to worship jar the warrior’s ashes.  The dusky standards captured in the Seven Years’ War droop about him.  The hundred intervening years have blackened them, already singed in the fire of Zorndorf, Leuthen, and Torgau.  The moth makes still larger the rent where the volleys passed.  The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs; and schooled as the Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so heroic.

Seven hundred years ago Frederick’s ancestor Conrad, the younger son of a family of some rank, but quite undistinguished, riding down from the little stronghold of Hohenzollern in Swabia, with nothing but a good head and arm, won favour with the Emperor Barbarossa and became at last Burggraf of Nuremberg.  I saw the old castle in which this Conrad lived and his line after him for several generations.  It rises among fortifications the plan for which Albert Duerer drew, with narrow windows in the thick masonry of the towers, the battlements worn by the pacing to and fro of sentinels in armour, and an ancient linden in the court-yard, planted by an empress a thousand years ago it is said, with as green a canopy to throw over the tourist to-day as it threw over those old Hohenzollerns.  Conrad transmitted to his descendants his good head and strong arm, until at length becoming masters of Baireuth and Anspach, they were Margraves and ranked among important princes.  Their seat now was at Culmbach, in the great castle of the Plessenburg.  I saw one May morning the grey walls of the old nest high on its cliff at the junction of the red and white Main, threatening still, for it is now a Bavarian prison.  The power of the house grew slowly.  In one age it got Brandenburg, in another the great districts of Ost and West Preussen; now it was possessions in Silesia, now again territory on the Rhine.  Power came sometimes through imperial gift, sometimes through marriage, sometimes through purchase or diplomacy or blows.  From poor soldiers of fortune to counts, from counts to princes, from princes to electors, and at last kings.  Sometimes they are unscrupulous, sometimes feeble, sometimes nobly heroic and faithful; more often strong than weak in brain and hand.  The Hohenzollern tortoise keeps creeping forward in its history, surpassing many a swift hare that once despised it in the race.  I believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe.  There is certainly none whose history on the whole is better.  Margraf