and
in themselves sufficiently sad), being all done,--his friends or daily
company are admitted: five chiefly, or (NOT counting Minister Hertzberg)
four, Lucchesini, Schwerin, Pinto, Gortz; who sit with him about one
hour now, and two hours in the evening again:--dreary company to our
minds, perhaps not quite so dreary to the King's; but they are all he
has left. And he talks cheerfully with them "on Literature, History,
on the topics of the day, or whatever topic rises, as if there were no
sickness here." A man adjusted to his hard circumstances; and bearing
himself manlike and kinglike among them.

He well knew himself to be dying; but some think, expected that the end
might be a little farther off. There is a grand simplicity of stoicism
in him; coming as if by nature, or by long SECOND-nature; finely
unconscious of itself, and finding nothing of peculiar in this new trial
laid on it. From of old, Life has been infinitely contemptible to him.
In death, I think, he has neither fear nor hope. Atheism, truly, he
never could abide: to him, as to all of us, it was flatly inconceivable
that intellect, moral emotion, could have been put into HIM by an Entity
that had none of its own. But there, pretty much, his Theism seems to
have stopped. Instinctively, too, he believed, no man more firmly,
that Right alone has ultimately any strength in this world: ultimately,
yes;--but for him and his poor brief interests, what good was it? Hope
for himself in Divine Justice, in Divine Providence, I think he had not
practically any; that the unfathomable Demiurgus should concern himself
with such a set of paltry ill-given animalcules as oneself and mankind
are, this also, as we have often noticed, is in the main incredible to
him.

A sad Creed, this of the King's;--he had to do his duty without fee or
reward. Yes, reader;--and what is well worth your attention, you will
have difficulty to find, in the annals of any Creed, a King or man
who stood more faithfully to his duty; and, till the last hour, alone
concerned himself with doing that. To poor Friedrich that was all the
Law and all the Prophets: and I much recommend you to surpass him,
if you, by good luck, have a better Copy of those inestimable
Documents!--Inarticulate notions, fancies, transient aspirations, he
might have, in the background of his mind. One day, sitting for a while
out of doors, gazing into the Sun, he was heard to murmur, "Perhaps I
shall be nearer thee soon:"-