Ten days after the battle of Kollin his mother died.  A few weeks afterward he drove in anger his brother August Wilhelm from the army, because he had not been strong enough to lead it.  The next year this brother died “of sorrow,” as the officer of the day announced to the King.  Shortly after he received the news of the death of his sister at Bayreuth.  One after another his generals fell by his side, or lost the King’s confidence, because they were not equal to the superhuman tasks of this war.  His veterans, the pride of his heart, hardened warriors, seasoned in three fierce wars, who, dying, stretched out their hands toward him and called his name, were crushed in entire companies about him, and what came to fill the broad gaps that death incessantly mowed in his army were young men, some good material, but many worthless.  The King made use of them as he did of others, more sternly, more severely.  His glance and his word gave courage and devotion even to the inferior sort, but still he knew that all this was not salvation.  His criticism became brief and cutting, his praise rare.  So he lived on; five summers and winters came and went; the work was gigantic; his thinking and scheming was inexhaustible, his eagle eye scrutinized searchingly the most remote and petty circumstances, and yet there was no change, and no hope anywhere.  The King read and wrote in leisure hours just as before; he composed verses and kept up a correspondence with Voltaire and Algarotti, but he was prepared to see all this come soon to an end—­a swift and sudden one.  He carried in his pocket day and night something which could make him free from Daun and Laudon.  At times the whole affair filled him with disdain.

The letters of the man from whom Germany dates a new epoch in its intellectual life deserve to be read with reverence by every German.  When you find him writing to Frau von Camas, “For the last six years I have felt that it is the living, not the dead, for whom one should be sorry,” if you are shocked by the gloomy energy of his determination you must beware of thinking that in it the power of this remarkable spirit found its highest expression.  It is true that the King had some moments of desperation when he longed for death by the enemy’s bullet in order not to be forced to use the capsule which he carried in his pocket.  He was indeed fully determined not to ruin the State by living as a captive of Austria; to this extent what he writes is terribly true.  But he was also of a poetic temperament, a child of the century which so longed for great deeds and found such immense satisfaction in the expression of exalted feelings.  He was, to the bottom of his heart, a German with the same emotional needs as, for instance, the infinitely weaker Klopstock and his admirers.  The consideration and resolute expression of his final resolve made him freer and more cheerful at heart.  He wrote to his sister at Bayreuth about it in the momentous second year