capable of extinguishing your Majesty here in your own Court, and
makiug Prussia a bit of England; all eyes being turned to such
sumptuous Princess and her Crown-Prince,--Heir-Apparent, or
'Rising Sun' as we may call him!"--

These really are three weighty almost dreadful considerations to a
poetic-tempered King and Smoking Parliament. Out of which there is
no refuge except indeed this plain fourth one: "No hurry about
Fritz's marriage; [Friedrich Wilhelm to Reichenbach (13th May),
infra.] he is but eighteen gone; evidently too young for
housekeeping. Thirty is a good time for marrying. 'There is, thank
God, no lack of royal lineage; I have two other Princes,'"--and
another just at hand, if I knew it.

To all which there is to be added that ever-recurring invincible
gravitation towards the Kaiser, and also towards Julich and Berg,
by means of him,--well acted on by the Tobacco-Parliament for the
space of those six weeks. During which, accordingly, almost from
the first day after that Hotham Dinner of April 3d, the answer of
the royal mind, with superficial fluctuations, always is:
"Wilhelmina at once, if you choose; likely enough we might agree
about Crown-Prince Friedrich too, if once all were settled; but of
the Double-Marriage, at this present time, HORE NIT, [Ranke,
i. 285 n.] I will have nothing to say." And as the English answer
steadily, "Both or none!"--meaning indeed to draw Prussia away
from the Kaiser's leading-strings, and out of his present
enchanted condition under the two Black-Artists he has about him,
the Negotiation sinks again into a mere smoking, and extinct or
plainly extinguishing state.