and through the period
comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest
of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain
absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything,
and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it
to others' senses.

It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a
starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that.
Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads
all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon,
the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I
could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do
with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries
before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for
Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.

Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close
of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in
1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and
lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in
Handel, and technically, even his "_Feste Burg_" is the first note of
the "_Inspirate_" in "_I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!_"

It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford
to ignore this. No modern aesthetician from the Rhine to the Spree
affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various
forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul,
or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high
priest of the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It
was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince,
and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was
present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the _uralte_
forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the
_Siegfried_ of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach
strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the
Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his
base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no
secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with
fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been
touched. The chancellor was chilled by