idered vestments stuffed like dolls
with bran," or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in
the gallery at Potsdam.

When Levy Bruehl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the
disasters of later years, says: "_Il voulait une nation vivante_" he
wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage
where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it
loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and
evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still
power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so
splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost
truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in
them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by
their poetry, their song, their native tongue.

It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns
have nothing to do with all this idealism,--and it is this which
constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which
the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to
which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close;
the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what
had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union
after Leipsic and the War of Freedom--culminating in its supreme and
inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of
the distant North were as Brandenburgers, "electors," component parts,
be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, "of one great heart," (as
Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] "though we did not
know it."

[5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by
Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.

Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Levy Bruehl lies in the
unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader
the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as
it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or
present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species,
and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief
cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in
by mind and eye from the _Niebelungen Lied_ to the wholesale captivity
of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus
conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in