but by a grievous error, which, as an error, could be forgiven in a man.  But for that very reason it is not inconsistent with his heroic character for him to exclaim “Oh, friend!  Then help me!  Save me!  I am lost!” For a man shows himself as such when he gives up for lost a possession which is lost, not when he, like a madman, renounces everything for the sake of making fine phrases:  and the Prince only does his duty when he tries in whatever way he can, to rescue his life from the despotic will of an individual.  In the fifth scene, where he implores the Electress to intercede for him, he says: 

  “You would not speak thus, mother mine, if death
  Had ever terribly encompassed you
  As it doth me.  With potencies of heaven,
  You and my lady, these who serve you, all
  The world that rings me round, seem blest to save
  The very stable-boy, the meanest, least,
  That tends your horses, pleading I could hang
  About his neck crying:  Oh, save me, thou!”

Even that is, in my opinion, fine and human, for it is the first ebullition of emotion; and when is the feeling of painful loss ever separated from the lively desire to preserve the endangered possession?  I do not make this statement because I believe I am saying something new, but because I think it is something old which has not been sufficiently taken to heart.  For the rest, this fifth scene is very beautiful and produces a deep effect.  Who does not feel annihilated with the Prince when he exclaims: 

  “Since I beheld my grave, life, life, I want,
  And do not ask if it be kept with honor.”

And farther on,

  “And tell him this, forget it not, that I
  Desire Nathalie no more, for her
  All tenderness within my heart is quenched.”

And how wonderful, how splendid does Nathalie appear in her calm nobility!  How absolutely true to nature it is that her strength first begins gently and noiselessly to unfold its wings when the man, whom she had looked upon as her ideal, from whom she had expected all things, has succumbed.  And how genuinely womanly are the words with which she attempts to raise him up once more: 

  “Return, young hero, to your prison walls,
  And, on your passage, imperturbably
  Regard once more the grave they dug for you. 
  It is not gloomier, nor more wide at all
  Than those the battle showed a thousand times!”

But poetic beauty is like the fragrance of flowers—­it cannot be described, but only perceived.

Nathalie’s character is rounded off in the first scene of the fourth act when she begs the Elector to liberate Homburg.  She could have borne the death of the Prince, but this timorous misrepresentation of himself she cannot bear: 

  “I never guessed a man could sink so low
  Whom history applauded as her hero. 
  For look—­I am a woman and I shrink
  From the mere worm that draws too near my foot;
  But so undone, so void of all control,
  So unheroic quite, though lion-like
  Death fiercely came, he should not find me thus! 
  Oh, what is human greatness, human fame!”