he is at peace with nature, his great comforting mother.  There is no sudden and surprising break in his mental or spiritual development.  The ideal of the strategist, as antiquity saw it, appears to be consummated in his person.  William James, himself an ardent pacificist, well observed that in the modern soldier there is a matter-of-factness far removed from the bluff and make-believe of modern life in general.  He might have chosen Moltke as the best type of this sort of warrior.  But there was much more than this scientific and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke’s nature a fine sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency.  We have striking evidence of this in the Trostgedanken, the Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence, which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and eventful career.  But this is not all; for most astonishing of all in the richness of this well-rounded harmony of over ninety years of life is a lively source of humor, due more to endowment and inheritance from his mother than to her influence, as his letters to her bear witness.  When war is declared in 1870 he remarks that a new vitality has entered his carcass, and, on the very eve of his demise, when in the morning he had attended a session of the Upper House of the Prussian Diet, loyal to his work and task to the very last moment, he closed the last and winning game of whist he played with the quotation of that grim bit of humor characteristic of Frederick the Great and his soldiery:  “Wat seggt hei nu to sine ollen Suepers?”

In Moltke, if in any one, the character of the man reveals the character and style of his writing.  Mommsen, in his address mentioned above, characterizes him as “the man who knew how to describe, as well as how to win, battles, the master of style in his rare speeches, the clever and sympathetic investigator of and writer on manifold ethnic life, the scientific explorer of the regions on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.”  It is obvious, though, that this mastery of style, this superb union of form and content, was not attained miraculously and from the start.  Still, his first production, published in 1827, a tale (Novelle) in the style of Tieck and his followers, shows distinctive talent, and a tendency toward brevity as well as adequacy of expression, not to mention a sustained sense of harmony and proportion.  The young lieutenant also published, anonymously, some poetry, and showed a clever hand in translating from foreign poets.  It is a pity that most of these attempts are buried in inaccessible periodicals and have never been republished.  But he left the field of poetry and fiction, so far as we know, forever with his next work, the first published under his name and in pamphlet form, a work