While the gray-haired King planned and created, year after year passed over his thoughtful head.  His surroundings became stiller and more solitary; the circle of men whom he took into his confidence became smaller.  He had laid aside his flute, and the new French literature appeared to him shallow and tedious.  Sometimes it seemed to him as if a new life were budding under him in Germany, but he was a stranger to it.  He worked untiringly for his army and for the prosperity of his people; the instruments he used were of less and less importance to him, while his feeling for the great duties of his crown became ever loftier and more passionate.

But just as his seven years’ struggle in war may be called superhuman, so now there was in his work something tremendous, which appeared to his contemporaries sometimes more than earthly and sometimes inhuman.  It was great, but it was also terrible, that for him the prosperity of the whole was at any moment the highest thing, and the comfort of the individual so utterly nothing.  When he drove out of the service with bitter censure, in the presence of his men, a colonel whose regiment had made a vexatious mistake on review; when in the swamp land of the Netze he counted more the strokes of the 10,000 spades than the sufferings of the workmen who lay ill with malarial fever in the hospitals he had erected for them; when he anticipated with his restless demands the most rapid execution, there was, though united with the deepest respect and devotion, a feeling of awe among his people, as before one whose being is moved by some unearthly power.  He appeared to the Prussians as the fate of the State, unaccountable, inexorable, omniscient, comprehending the greatest as well as the smallest.  And when they told each other that he had also tried to overcome Nature, and that yet his orange trees had perished in the last frosts of spring, then they quietly rejoiced that there was a limit for their King after all, but still more that he had submitted to it with such good-humor and had taken off his hat to the cold days of May.

With touching sympathy the people collected all the incidents of the King’s life which showed human feeling, and thus gave an intimate picture of him.  Lonesome as his house and garden were, the imagination of his Prussians hovered incessantly around the consecrated place.  If any one on a warm moonlight night succeeded in getting into the vicinity of the palace, he found the doors open, perhaps without a guard, and he could see the great King sleeping in his room on a camp bed.  The fragrance of the flowers, the song of the night birds, the quiet moonlight, were the only guards, almost the only courtiers of the lonely man.  Fourteen times the oranges bloomed at Sans Souci after the acquisition of West Prussia—­then Nature asserted her rights over the great King.  He died alone, with but his servants about him.