ictions at
Berlin, the want of moral courage and political faith among those in whose
hands the destinies of Germany had been placed, roused him to wrath and
fury, though he could never be driven to despair of the future of Prussia.
For a time, indeed, he seemed to hesitate between Frankfort, then the seat
of the German Parliament, and Berlin; and he would have accepted the
Premiership at Frankfort if his friend Baron Stockmar had accepted the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But very soon he perceived that, however
paralyzed for the moment, Prussia was the only possible centre of life for
a regeneration of Germany; that Prussia could not be merged in Germany,
but that Germany had to be resuscitated and reinvigorated through Prussia.
His patriotic nominalism, if we may so call his youthful dreams of a
united Germany, had to yield to the force of that political realism which
sacrifices names to things, poetry to prose, the ideal to the possible.
What made his decision easier than it would otherwise have been to a heart
so full of enthusiasm was his personal attachment to the King and to the
Prince of Prussia. For a time, indeed, though for a short time only,
Bunsen, after his interview with the King in January, 1849, believed that
his hopes might still be realized, and he seems actually to have had the
King's promise that he would accept the crown of a United Germany, without
Austria. But as soon as Bunsen had left Berlin, new influences began to
work on the King's brain; and when Bunsen returned, full of hope, he was
told by the King himself that he had never repented in such a degree of
any step as that which Bunsen had advised him to take; that the course
entered upon was a wrong to Austria; that he would have nothing to do with
such an abominable line of politics, but would leave that to the Ministry
at Frankfort. Whenever the personal question should be addressed to him,
then would he reply as one of the Hohenzollern, and thus live and die as
an honest man. Bunsen, though mourning over the disappointed hopes that
had once centred in Frederick William IV., and freely expressing the
divergence of opinion that separated him from his sovereign, remained
throughout a faithful servant and a loyal friend. His buoyant spirit,
confident that nothing could ruin Prussia, was looking forward to the
future, undismayed by the unbroken succession of blunders and failures of
Prussian statesmen,--nay, enjoying with a prophetic fervor, at t