giddy new element; that all these fine procedures are at least
unaffected, to a singular degree true, and the product of nature,
on his part; and that, in short, the complete respect for Fact,
which used to be a quality of his, and which is among the highest
and also rarest in man, has on no side deserted him at present.

A trace of airy exuberance, of natural exultancy, not quite
repressible, on the sudden change to freedom and supreme power
from what had gone before: perhaps that also might be legible, if
in those opaque bead-rolls which are called Histories of Friedrich
anything human could with certainty be read! He flies much about
from place to place; now at Potsdam, now at Berlin, at
Charlottenburg, Reinsberg; nothing loath to run whither business
calls him, and appear in public: the gazetteer world, as we
noticed, which has been hitherto a most mute world, breaks out
here and there into a kind of husky jubilation over the great
things he is daily doing, and rejoices in the prospect of having a
Philosopher King; which function the young man, only twenty-eight
gone, cannot but wish to fulfil for the gazetteers and the world.
He is a busy man; and walks boldly into his grand enterprise of
"making men happy," to the admiration of Voltaire and an
enlightened public far and near.

Bielfeld speaks of immense concourses of people crowding about
Charlottenburg, to congratulate, to solicit, to &c.; tells us how
he himself had to lodge almost in outhouses, in that royal village
of hope, His emotions at Reinsberg, and everybody's, while
Friedrich Wilhelm lay dying, and all stood like greyhounds on the
slip; and with what arrow-swiftness they shot away when the great
news came: all this he has already described at wearisome length,