e would be a second Renaissance even greater than the great
Italian Renaissance.

Frederick was fairly intoxicated by the young man's singular good
fortune. What he particularly admired was the union of success and merit.
When he compared the abundance of these works, tossed off apparently as
in play, and the young man's cheerful evenness of temper with his own
torn, distracted existence, a feeling came upon him that he had never
before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of
discouragement and helpless defeat. While the light of the candles glided
over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the
formless clay, a voice within him kept saying:

"You have frittered away your existence, you have wasted your days, you
will never retrieve your loss."

And the voice of envy, of bitter reproach against a nameless being asked
why he had not been permitted to find a similar path and follow it in
time.

Ritter's life had received a wrench in Europe. Some brutal mishap while
he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert. Now,
after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench
had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best
suited to its growth. In the new surroundings, Ritter's nature developed
simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space
and sunlight. Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination in the
young prince from genius-land by granting him a surplus of
superordination.

Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick:

"I understand Toussaint, the Berlin sculptor, was on board the _Roland_."

Peter Schmidt had warned the artists in an aside not to touch upon the
disaster, telling them his friend was very nervous and a reference to the
accident might have a bad effect upon him. But his warning had been
forgotten.

"Poor Toussaint," Frederick said, "hoped to find mountains of gold here,
though, you may say, he was nothing but a fancy-cake genius."

"And yet I assure you," said Lobkowitz, "there was something grand about
him as a man. In spite of his success, he was always poor. He suffered
from having a wife who was too fond of society and from having to
associate with the persons who bestowed favours upon him and were so much
richer than himself. That dandyism of his was not natural. Had he reached
America, he would probably have ignored his wife and become an entirely
different man. All he wanted t