which seizes one when far away from human
sounds, by the brook-side or the hill-slope? "I feel as if I were
looking out on the mellowing foliage of a fine September day," he
writes again to his wife, "health and spirits good, but with a soft
touch of melancholy, a little homesickness, a longing for deep woods
and lakes, for a desert, for yourself and the children, and all this
mixed up with a sunset and Beethoven."

His domestic affections were by no means limited to those united to
him by ties of blood; he cherished strong patriarchal feelings for
every member of his household, past or present. He possessed in a high
degree the German tenderness for little things. He never forgot a
service rendered to him, however small. In the midst of the most
engrossing public activity he kept himself informed about the minutest
details of the management of his estates, so that his wife could once
laughingly say that a turnip from his own fields interested him vastly
more than all the problems of international politics.

His humor, also, was entirely of the German stamp. It was boisterous,
rollicking, aggressive, unsparing--of himself as little as of
others--cynic, immoderate, but never without a touch of good-nature.
His satire was often crushing, never venomous. His wit was racy and
exuberant never equivocal. Whether he describes his _vis-a-vis_ at a
hotel table, his Excellency So-and-So, as "one of those figures which
appear to one when he has the nightmare--a fat frog without legs, who
opens his mouth as wide as his shoulders, like a carpet-bag, for each
bit, so that I am obliged to hold tight on by the table from
giddiness"; whether he characterizes his colleagues at the Frankfort
Bundestag as "mere caricatures of periwig diplomatists, who at once
put on their official visage if I merely beg of them a light to my
cigar, and who study their words and looks with Regensburg care when
they ask for the key of the lavatory"; whether he sums up his
impression of the excited, emotional manner in which Jules Favre
pleaded with him for the peace terms in the words, "He evidently took
me for a public meeting"; whether he declined to look at the statue
erected to him at Cologne, because he "didn't care to see himself
fossilized"; whether he spoke of the unprecedented popular ovations
given to him at his final departure from Berlin as a "first-class
funeral"--there are always the same childlike directness, the same
naive impulsiveness, th