hand.  As soon as the difference between the ideal and the real person became unpleasantly perceptible, he let go the person and clung to the image.  One to whom nature has given this temperament, letting him see love and friendship chiefly through the colored glass of a poetical mood, will always, according to the judgment of others, show caprice in the choice of his friends.  The uniform warmth which treats with consideration all alike seems to be denied to such natures.  To any one to whom the King had become a friend in his own fashion, he always showed the greatest attention and assiduity, however much his moods changed at particular moments.  He could become as sentimental in his sorrow over the loss of such a friend as any German of the Werther period.  He had lived for many years on somewhat distant terms with his sister in Bayreuth, and not until the last years before her death, amid the terrors of a burdensome war, did her image rise vividly again before him as that of an affectionate sister.  After her death he found a gloomy satisfaction in picturing to himself and others the cordiality of his relations with her.  He erected a little temple to her and often made pilgrimages to it.  Toward any one who did not approach his heart through the medium of a poetic mood, or incite him to poetic expression of his affection, or who touched a wrong note anywhere in his sensitive nature, he was cold, contemptuous, and indifferent—­a king who only asked to what extent the other person could be useful to him; he even pushed him aside when he could no longer use him.  Such a character may perhaps surround the life of a young man with poetic lustre and give brightness and charm even to common things, but unless it is coupled with a high degree of morality, a sense of duty, and a mind set upon higher things, it will leave him sad and lonely in later years.  In the most favorable cases it will make bitter enemies as well as very warm admirers.  A somewhat similar disposition brought to Goethe’s noble soul heavy sorrows, transitory relations, many disappointments, and a solitary old age.  It becomes doubly momentous for a king, before whom others rarely stand with assurance and on equal terms; for his most sincere friends may yet turn into admiring flatterers, unstable in their bearing, now constrained under the moral spell of his majesty, now, under the conviction of their own rights, fault-finding and discontented.

This need of ideal relations and longing for people to whom he could unbosom himself without reserve, worked at cross purposes with Frederick’s penetrating discrimination, and his uncompromising love of truth, which was a deadly enemy of all deception, impatiently resisted every illusion, despised shams, and sought for the essence of things.  This scrutinizing view of life and its duties might well offer him protection against those deceptions which oftener annoy an imaginative prince, who gives his confidence, than a private individual.