Your most faithful v.B.

Biarritz, August 10, ’62.

My Beloved Heart,—­ * * * I am living about as at Stolpemuende, only without champagne; I drank some with Orloff today, for the first time since I left Paris.  In the afternoon I wander about among the cliffs, heaths, and fields, see orchards with aloe, figs, almonds, and borders of tamarinds, then I do some target-shooting, take my bath, sit on the rocks smoking, gazing at the sea, and thinking of you all.  Politics I have entirely forgotten; don’t read any papers.  The 15th has some claims upon me; for propriety’s sake I ought to go to Paris, too, since I am in France, so as to congratulate the Emperor, hear his speech, and attend the dinner.  But I shall hardly bring myself to the point of traveling over five hundred miles and interrupting the air-and-water cure, which is doing me so much good that I actually hate the thought of the dusty, close air of the royal residence.  The Emperor is too reasonable a gentleman to take my absence amiss, and from Berlin I have an honest leave of absence. * * * Farewell, my angel, with dearest love.

Your most faithful v.B.

Hohenmauth, Monday, September 7, ’66.

Do you remember, sweetheart, how we passed through here nineteen years ago, on the way from Prague to Vienna?  No mirror showed the future then, nor in 1852, when I went over this railway with good Lynar.  How strangely romantic are God’s ways!  We are doing well, in spite of Napoleon; if we are not unmeasured in our claims and do not imagine we have conquered the world, we shall achieve a peace that is worth the trouble.  But we are as easily intoxicated as disheartened, and it is my thankless part to pour water into the foaming wine, and to insist that we do not live alone in Europe, but with three other powers which hate and envy us.  The Austrians hold position in Moravia, and we are bold enough to announce our headquarters for tomorrow at the point where they are now.  Prisoners still keep passing in, and cannon, one hundred and eighty from the 3d to today.  If they bring up their southern army, we shall, with God’s gracious help, defeat it too; confidence is universal.  Our people are ready to embrace one another, every man so deadly in earnest, calm, obedient, orderly, with empty stomach, soaked clothes, wet camp, little sleep, shoe-soles dropping off, kindly to all, no sacking or burning, paying what they can and eating mouldy bread.  There must surely be a solid basis of fear of God in the common soldier of our army, or all this could not be.  News of our friends is hard to get; we lie miles apart from one another, none knowing where the other is, and nobody to send—­that is, men might be had, but no horses.  For four days I have had search made for Philip,[19] who was slightly wounded by a lance-thrust in the head, as Gerhard[20] wrote me, but I can’t find out where he is, and we have now come thirty-seven miles farther.  The King exposed himself greatly on the 3d and it