“ Thou destroyer, who hast taken my free will from me; thou creator, who hast produced within me the sensation of awakening, who hast convulsed me with a thousand electric sparks from the realm of sacred nature! Through thee I learned to love the curling of the tender vine, and the tears of my longing have fallen on its frost-kissed fruits; for thy sake I have kissed the young grass, for thy sake offered my open bosom to the dew; for thy sake I have listened intently when the butterfly and the bee swarmed about me, for I wanted to feel thee in the sacred sphere of thy enjoyments. ”

“ To think of giving a people a constitution a priori, though according to its content a more or less rational one—such a whim would precisely overlook that element which renders a constitution more than a mere abstract object. Every nation, therefore, has the constitution which is appropriate to it and belongs to it.
The State must, in its constitution, permeate all situations. A constitution is not a thing just made; it is the work of centuries, the idea and the consciousness of what is rational, in so far as it is developed in a people. ”

“ My Justice is a man of some sixty-odd years perhaps, but he carries a strong, large, rugged body, as yet unbent by age. In his reddish-yellow face is deposited the solar heat of the fifty harvests he has gathered in, his large nose stands out on his face like a tower, and his white, bristly eyebrows hang out over his glistening, blue eyes like a straw roof. He reminds me of a patriarch, who erects a monument of unhewn stones to the god of his ancestors and pours libations and oil upon it, rears his colts, cuts his corn, and at the same time judges and rules his people with unlimited authority. ”

“ Dost thou want me to tell thee of bygone days, how, when thy spirit was revealed to me, I gained control over my own spirit in order the more perfectly to embrace and love thine? And why should I not become dizzy with ecstasy? Is the prospect of a fall so fearful after all? Just as the precious jewel, touched by a single ray of light, reflects a thousand colors, so also thy beauty, illumined only by the ray of my enthusiasm, will be enriched a thousandfold. ”

“ Thy eye leaves me no more; thou must follow me in my movements, and I experience the triumph of success! All that thou scarcely divinest I reveal to thee in the dance, and thou art astonished at the wisdom concealed in it. Soon I cast off my airy robe and show thee my wings and mount on high! Then I rejoice to see thy eye following me, and I glide to earth again and sink into thy embrace. Then thou sighest and gazest at me in rapture. Waking from these dreams I return to mankind as from a distant land; their voices seem so strange and their demeanor too! ”

“ The noisy drums drown the longing that awakens a thousand times a day, the longing for an Art that still calls me as to a sacred mission; the uniform smothers the impulse to create human nobility; and in these drilled, unnatural motions of my limbs, my free will and my sense of personal dignity will perish at last. From such a fate there is no release for the poor bought soldier—no release but death. ”

“ All he can teach thee about it is pure magic; every combination of sounds is a phase of a higher existence, and for this reason Beethoven feels that he is the founder of a new sensuous basis in the spiritual life. Thou wilt probably be able to feel intuitively what I am trying to say, and that it is true. Who could replace this spirit? From whom could we expect anything equivalent to it? All human activity passes to and fro before him like clockwork; he alone creates freely from his inmost self the undreamed of, the untreated. ”

“ KING. Then come to me, Prince, for the contract with Vienna. A German state in
England's stead! 'Tis better so, gentlemen, better so. I will cleave to
Germany with all my soul. Foreign egotism shall teach German peoples and
Princes how to be truly united. [He goes out into his study. GRUMBKOW,
SECKENDORF and the generals follow.]
QUEEN (to HOTHAM) .
Sir, you have been witness to a scene which confirms for you the truth as to my position here, the truth that is not yet credited in England. Wilhelmine, the news of the arrival of the Prince of Wales gives me fresh hope. ”

“ It was fortunate that the wild wolves from the Odenwald [11] did not appear, for I should have grappled with them had I thought of thy honor. It seems foolish, but it's true.—Midnight, the evil hour of spirits, awakens me, and I lie at the window in the cold winter wind. All Frankfurt is dead, the wicks in the street lamps are on the point of expiring, and the old rusty weather-vanes cry out to me, and I ask myself, is that the eternal tune? Then I feel that this life is a prison where we all have only a pitiful vision of real freedom; that is one's own soul. ”

“ He was no less sincere in his determination to make literature introduce the German people to a larger, richer, freer, and truer human life for the individual and for the state. In his eyes statecraft, religion, philosophy, science, and industry teemed with raw material of surpassing interest and importance for the literary artist. He accordingly set himself the task in one way and another to make his own generation share this conviction. It is quite true that he was not the man to transform with his own hands this raw material into works of art of consummate beauty and perfection. ”

“ When in a few weeks I go into the Rhine country, for spring will be here then, I shall write thee from every mountain; I am always so much nearer thee when I am outside the city walls. I sometimes seem to feel thee then with every breath I take. I feel thee reigning in my heart when it is beautiful without, when the air caresses; yes, when nature is good and kind like thee, then I feel thee so distinctly! * * *
* * * All other men seem to me as one and the same—I do not distinguish between them, and I take no interest in the great universal sea of human events. ”

“ To subject oneself to its inscrutable laws, to curb and guide one's spirit by means of these laws, so that it will pour forth the revelations of music—this is the isolating principle of art. To be dissolved by its revelation—that is the surrender to the divine, which quietly exercises its mastery over the delirium of unbridled forces and thus imparts the greatest efficacy to the imagination. Thus art always represents divinity, and the human relationship to art constitutes religion. ”

“ The State is the march of God through the world, its ground is the power of reason realizing itself as will. The idea of the State should not connote any particular State, or particular institution; one must rather consider the Idea only, this actual God, by itself. Because it is more easy to find defects than to grasp the positive meaning, one readily falls into the mistake of emphasizing so much the particular nature of the State as to overlook its inner organic essence. The State is no work of art. It exists in the world, and thus in the realm of caprice, accident, and error. ”

“ If, on the other hand, we consider subjectivity, we find that subjective knowledge and will is thought. But by the very act of thoughtful cognition and volition, I will the universal object—the substance of absolute Reason. We observe, therefore, an essential union between the objective side—the Idea, and the subjective side—the personality that conceives and wills it. The objective existence of this union is the State, which is therefore the basis and centre of the other concrete elements of the life of a people—of art, of law, of morals, of religion, of science. ”

“ PRINCE. Hotham! Is it possible? You here in Berlin, friend?
HOTHAM. Why, what is the matter, Prince?
PRINCE. Think of meeting you—you dear, excellent fellow—and just at the very moment when my despair threatened to overcome me! Is it really true? Where do you come from? From Paris?
HOTHAM. I've just come from England, Prince, with the very best greetings from our mutual friends and a special commission to capture you and bring you back to the race-track, to the hunting field, and the boxing ring, which you so enjoyed.
PRINCE. Alas, Hotham—all those pleasures are over for me! ”

“ As long as I have anything to tell thee, I firmly believe that thy spirit is fixed upon me as upon so many enigmas of nature. In fact, I believe that every human being is such an enigma, and that the mission of love between friends is to solve that enigma so that each shall learn to know his deeper nature through and in his friend. Yes, dearest, it makes me happy that my life is gradually developing through thee, and for that reason I do not want to seem what I am not ”

“ Art is not genuine art until it has thus liberated itself. It fulfils its highest task when it has joined the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become a certain mode of bringing to consciousness and expression the divine meaning of things, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most universal truths of the spirit. Into works of art the nations have wrought their most profound ideas and aspirations. Fine Art often constitutes the key, and with many nations it is the only key, to an understanding of their wisdom and religion. ”

“ The lightning-flash of individuality strikes the inert mass, permeates it, and a form no longer merely symmetrical, but infinite and spiritual, concentrates and molds its adequate bodily shape. This is the task of sculpture. Inasmuch as in it the inner spiritual element, which architecture can no more than hint at, completely abides with the sensuous form and its external matter, and as both sides are so merged into each other that neither predominates, sculpture has the classical form of art as its fundamental type. ”

“ Opposed to this religion of the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.
Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite—what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? ”

“ Let the insecurity finally come, in the form of Hussars with glistening sabres, and show its earnest activity, and that touching edification which foresaw all this now turns upon the enemy with curses. In spite of this, wars will break out whenever necessity demands them; but the seeds spring up anew, and speech is silenced before the grave repetitions of history.
The military class is the class of universality. The defense of the State is its privilege, and its duty is to realize the ideality contained in it, which consists in self-sacrifice. There are different kinds of bravery. ”

“ Everything is quiet and all in the house are asleep dreaming of the things they desire when awake; but I alone am awake with thee. Outside, on the street, all is still. I should like to be assured that at this moment no soul besides mine is thinking of thee, that no other heart gives a throb for thee, and that I alone in the wide world am sitting at thy feet, my heart beating with full strokes. ”

“ I appreciate that an eighteen-year-old Princess has to consider history, posterity and so forth—but this conscientiousness will be your ruin. The King will continue to make a slave of you, the Queen to treat you as a child. You are the victim of the conflict between two characters who both perhaps desire what is best for you, but who are so totally different that you will never know whom or which one to please. The Crown Prince has made himself free—and how did he do it? ”

“ To give perfect expression to thee would probably be the most powerful seal of my love, indeed, being a creation of divine nature, it would prove my affinity to thee. It would be an enigma solved, like unto a long restrained mountain torrent which at last penetrates to the light, enduring the tremendous fall in voluptuous rapture, at a moment of life through which and after which a higher existence begins. ”

“ Hence the fundamental type of architecture is the symbolical form of art. For it is architecture that paves the way, as it were, for the adequate realization of the God, toiling and wrestling in his service with external nature, and seeking to extricate it from the chaos of finitude and the abortiveness of chance. By this means it levels a space for the God, frames his external surroundings, and builds him his temple as the place for inner contemplation and for reflection upon the eternal objects of the spirit. ”

“ The courage of the animal, or the robber, the bravery which arises from a sense of honor, the chivalrous bravery, are not yet the true forms of it. In civilized nations true bravery consists in the readiness to give oneself wholly to the service of the State, so that the individual counts but as one among many. Not personal valor, but the important aspect of it, lies in self-subordination to the universal cause.
To risk one's life is indeed something more than mere fear of death, but this is only negative; only a positive character—an aim and content—gives meaning to bravery. ”

“ Whatever we acquire through art comes from God; it is a divine inspiration, which sets up an attainable goal for human capacities.
"We do not know whence our knowledge comes; the firmly inclosed seed requires the warm, moist, electric soil to sprout, to think, to express itself. Music is the electric soil in which the soul lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a precipitation of its electric spirit, and the need that philosophy feels of basing everything on an ultimate principle is in turn relieved by music. ”

“ The insight, then, to which—in contradistinction to those ideals—philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be—that the truly good, the universal divine Reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself. This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of His government, the carrying out of His plan, is the history of the world. This plan philosophy strives to comprehend; for only that which has been developed as the result of it possesses bona fide reality. ”

“ Thou tamest toward me through the whispering forest, enveloped in a soft haze, and when thou wert quite near me my tired senses could not endure it, so strong was the fragrance of the wild thyme. Then I fell asleep—it was so beautiful—all blossoms and fragrance! And the great boundless host of stars and the flickering silver moon that danced near and far upon the stream, the intense stillness of nature in which one hears all that stirs—ah, I feel my soul implanted here in this nocturnal trembling! Future thoughts are blossoming here ”