ONE: My heart and my inclination excited in me, from the moment I mounted the throne, the desire of having you here, that you might put our Berlin Academy in the shape you alone are capable of giving it. Come then, come, and insert into this wild crab-tree the sciences, that it may bear fruit. You have shown the figure of the earth to mankind; show also to a king how sweet it is to possess such a man as you.
TWO:At Oppeln there was a bridge across the Oder by which the king hoped to escape with his regiment to the free country beyond. There he intended to summon to his aid the army of thirty-six thousand men which he had sent to G?tten under the Old Dessauer. The discharge of the musketry of the Austrians blasted even this dismal hope. It seemed as though Frederick259 were doomed to drain the cup of misery to its dregs; and his anguish must have been intensified by the consciousness that he deserved it all. But a few leagues behind him, the bleak, snow-clad plains, swept by the night-winds, were strewed with the bodies of eight or nine thousand men, the dying and the dead, innocent peasant-boys torn from their homes, whose butchery had been caused by his own selfish ambition.
ONE:THE PANDOURS.On the 20th of January, 1745, Charles Albert, the unhappy344 and ever-unfortunate Emperor of Germany, died at Munich, in the forty-eighth year of his age. Tortured by a complication of the most painful disorders, he had seldom, for weary years, enjoyed an hour of freedom from acute pain. An incessant series of disasters crushed all his hopes. He was inextricably involved in debt. Triumphant foes drove him from his realms. He wandered a fugitive in foreign courts, exposed to humiliation and the most cutting indignities. Thus the victim of bodily and mental anguish, it is said that one day some new tidings of disaster prostrated him upon the bed of death. He was patient and mild, but the saddest of mortals. Gladly he sought refuge in the tomb from the storms of his drear and joyless life. An eye-witness writes, Charles Alberts pious and affectionate demeanor drew tears from all eyes. The manner in which he took leave of his empress would have melted a heart of stone.
TWO:CHAPTER XXVII. THE LEUTHEN CAMPAIGN.The treaty of Breslau was signed on the 11th of June, and ratified at Berlin on the 28th of July. By this treaty, Silesia, Lower and Upper, was ceded to Frederick and his heirs for evermore, while Frederick withdrew from the French alliance, and entered into friendly relations with her Hungarian majesty. Immediately after the settlement of this question, Frederick, cantoning his troops in Silesia, returned to Berlin. Elate with victory314 and accompanied by a magnificent suite, the young conqueror hastened home, over green fields and beneath a summers sun. Keenly he enjoyed his triumph, greeted with the enthusiastic acclaim of the people in all the towns and villages through which he passed.67 At Frankfort-on-the-Oder, where a fair was in operation, the king stopped for a few hours. Vast crowds, which had been drawn to the place by the fair, lined the highway for a long distance on both sides, eager to see the victor who had aggrandized Prussia by adding a large province to its realms.
