r recognize it, then?"
Whereby come results incalculable; not good results any of them;--some
of them unspeakably bad! The ease of Crown-Prince Friedrich in Berlin is
not singular; all cities and places can still show the like. And when it
will end, is not yet clear. But that it ever should have begun, will one
day be the astonishment. As if the divinest function of a human being
were not even that of believing; of discriminating, with his God-given
intellect, what is from what is not; and as if the point were, to render
that either an impossible function, or else what we must sorrowfully
call a revolutionary, rebellious and mutinous one. O Noltenius, O
Panzendorf, do for pity's sake take away your Catechetical ware; and say
either nothing to the poor young Boy, or some small thing he will find
to be BEYOND doubt when he can judge of it! Fever, pestilence, are bad
for the body; but Doubt, impious mutiny, doubly impious hypocrisy, are
these nothing for the mind? Who would go about inculcating Doubt, unless
he were far astray indeed, and much at a loss for employment!

But the sorest fact in Friedrich's schooling, the forest, for the
present, though it ultimately proved perhaps the most beneficent one,
being well dealt with by the young soul, and nobly subdued to his higher
uses, remains still to be set forth. Which will be a long business,
first and last!

Chapter XII. -- CROWN-PRINCE FALLS INTO DISFAVOR WITH PAPA.

Those vivacities of young Fritz, his taste for music, finery, those
furtive excursions into the domain of Latin and forbidden things, were
distasteful and incomprehensible to Friedrich Wilhelm: Where can such
things end? They begin in disobedience and intolerable perversity; they
will be the ruin of Prussia and of Fritz!--Here, in fact, has a great
sorrow risen. We perceive the first small cracks of incurable divisions
in the royal household; the breaking out of fountains of bitterness,
which by and by spread wide enough. A young sprightly, capricions and
vivacious Boy, inclined to self-will, had it been permitted; developing
himself into foreign tastes, into French airs and ways; very ill seen by
the heavy-footed practical Germanic Majesty.

The beginnings of this sad discrepancy are traceable from Friedrich's
sixth or seventh year: "Not so dirty, Boy!" And there could be no lack
of growth in the mutual ill-humor, while the Boy himself continued
growing; enlarging in bulk and in activity of his own.