was the very incarnation of German character. Although an aristocrat
by birth and bearing, and although, especially during the years of
early manhood, passionately given over to the aristocratic habits of
dueling, hunting, swaggering and carousing, he was essentially a man
of the people. Nothing was so utterly foreign to him as any form of
libertinism; even his eccentricities were of the hardy, homespun sort.
He was absolutely free from social vanity; he detested court
festivities; he set no store by orders or decorations; the only two
among the innumerable ones conferred upon him which he is said to have
highly valued were the Prussian order of the Iron Cross, bestowed for
personal bravery on the battlefield, and the medal for "rescuing from
danger" which he earned in 1842 for having saved his groom from
drowning by plunging into the water after him.
All his instincts were bound up with the soil from which he had
sprung. He passionately loved the North German plain, with its gloomy
moorlands, its purple heather, its endless wheatfields, its kingly
forests, its gentle lakes, and its superb sweep of sky and clouds.
Writing to his friends when abroad--he traveled very little abroad--he
was in the habit of describing foreign scenery by comparing it to
familiar views and places on his own estates. During sleepless nights
in the Chancellery at Berlin there would often rise before him a
sudden vision of Varzin, his Pomeranian country-seat, "perfectly
distinct in the minutest particulars, like a great picture with all
its colors fresh--the green trees, the sunshine on the stems, the blue
sky above. I saw every individual tree." Never was he more happy than
when alone with nature. "Saturday," he writes to his wife from
Frankfort, "I drove to Ruedesheim. There I took a boat, rowed out on
the Rhine, and swam in the moonlight, with nothing but nose and eyes
out of water, as far as the Maeuseturm near Bingen, where the bad
bishop came to his end. It gives one a peculiar dreamy sensation to
float thus on a quiet warm night in the water, gently carried down by
the current, looking above on the heavens studded with moon and stars,
and on each side the banks and wooded hilltops and the battlements of
the old castles bathed in the moonlight, whilst nothing falls on one's
ear but the gentle splashing of one's movements. I should like to swim
like this every evening." And what poet has more deeply felt than he
that vague musical longing
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