N TO dull town, perhaps, in all Europe is many, that the three ladies who have to surrounded with a choicer garland of brave the inclemencies of a capricious cliparks than Potsdam. Let your eyes wan- mate in order to support Frederic's crown der wherever you please-down the famous were none other than Maria Theresa, terraces of Sans Souci, erewhile a royal Empress of Austria, Catherine, Empress of hermit's retreat, or over the woodlands of Russia, and the Marquise de Pompadour, Babelsberg, which the present Emperor the very three who had labored most perplanted when a younger son, or in the sistently to thwart his purposes. In strict cool glades of Glienicke, his brother Karl's truth Frederic's resentment had taken, as most tasteful domain, or across the wa- our readers know, a very different directers skirting the Marmor Palais, where a tion at the time he built the Neue Palais, young mother was but lately seen show- to express in stone his belief in lasting ing her baby to his hoary great-grand-peace-the same year (be it said in parenfather, or (to leave several other pretty spots unmentioned) from the Pfingot berge over the goodly expanse of water formed by the river Havel: everywhere gardens are joined to gardens and parks to parks. All breathes peace and rest from toil, and great are the numbers of Berlin families that resort thither on Sundays, freely admitted to the enjoyment of pure air, and to the elevating effect of centennial trees and fine works of art. thesis) which saw George Washington calmly planning a drainage of the Dismal Swamp, in full assurance (soon to be destroyed) that nothing would occur to tear him from the pure domestic joys of Mount Vernon. In this his present summer residence was Prince Frederic William of Prussia born October 18, 1831. His grandfather, third of that name, was then reigning. His uncle ascended the throne nine years Two palaces also belong to royalty at later, under the name of Frederic WillPotsdam. One inside the town, the other iam IV. To him no children were born, at the extreme end of the Sans Souci Gar- so that the crown eventually devolved dens. This latter, called the Neue Palais, upon William I., King of Prussia since is now the residence during the summer 1860, and Emperor of Germany since 1871, months of the heir apparent, who has our Frederic William's father. Born undevoted much time and trouble to the der expectations of kingship, his boyembellishment of its surroundings. In hood was allowed, nevertheless, to expand side, its chilling showy apartments have in the genuine unfettered country life of resisted in vain the warm and tender in- Babelsberg, with every tree and shrub of fluences of a family life so blessed, so com- which he has, so to say, grown up in intiplete and happy in all its bearings, as to macy. The house, which thousands of suffuse with gentle sweetness the pomp Americans have visited, is of small diand circumstance of regal surroundings. mensions, but erected with that exquisite adaptation to locality which only "Gothic" architecture seems capable of effecting. If there be a special turn of the river, or a sweep of trees which the eye would love to behold, the architect has it in his power so to shape and turn his rooms and orielwindows as exactly to place that particular view within reach. Who has not deplored the square palazzo cumbering like an incubus the loveliest of the Borromean Islands? Let the Renaissance build her palaces in streets and squares, but leave us the "Gothic" homestead for tasteful landscape use. The Neue Palais was the work of Frederic the Great soon after the close of the Seven Years' War. Did he say it, or was the dictum astutely fathered on him? but the story goes that he declared he would show the world that he had yet some money over. It is a grand rococo structure, surmounted by a royal crown, and supported gracefully by three slightly draped female figures high up in the air. Of course those bronze figures represent the three Graces bearing the crown of one who loved the Muses, and whose writingtable the Adorante of Lysippus never left. However, no act of that sarcastic sovereign has been known to escape a companion legend of some kind or other. Thus it was loudly asserted at the time, and is believed at the present day by To the house of Babelsberg the boy prince was fervently attached. On his first visit to England in 1851, to which attention will be drawn hereafter, a countryman only a few years older than him ENTRANCE OF THE CROWN PRINCE INTO JERUSALEM.- -[SEE PAGE 372.] From the painting by W. Gentz, photographed by the Photographische Gesellschaft, Berlin. and his own little snuggery to all the finest splendors wherever found; nor is it possible that the home in which such a sentiment has grown to maturity should not be pure, and filled with noble and high purposes. Such, indeed, was the case. Everybody knows the father's career, which to-day already stamps him with a legendary type like his predecessor Charlemagne. The mother is far less known out of her country. Yet she deserves to be; for, indeed, more labor, conscientiously and right heroically undertaken, has rarely been concentrated into one life. In Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, the pupil of Goethe and the friend of Alexander von Humboldt, beauty and talents, tastes and longings, rank and position, have all and ever been counted as dust in the balance when compared to the regal duty of filling the post to which Providence had called her. No second of each waking hour is allowed to pass without a straining of every nerve in the fulfillment of such tasks as her everactive brain suggests, all tending to the one object of her life, viz., to increase the patrimony of respect and loyalty which has been accumulating in favor of the family into which her destiny has thrown her. Great was the care she bestowed upon choosing governesses and masters for her son's earliest years. In obedience to a family tradition the boy was also early set to do handiwork. He chose carpentering and book-binding, and went through a regular course of each under professional teachers. His schooling was finally intrusted to Ernst Curtius, a native of that famous ancient republic of Lübeck, and well known to our readers as the historian of Greece. The mother's attention had been first drawn toward him by a public lecture he gave treating of the Acropolis of Athens. There was something about him that fixed her attention. In him the Athenian mind seemed, as it were, to be reproduced. Imbued with an exquisite sense of the beautiful, he treats of the fine arts, of history, and mythology, even of grammar or topography, with a bewitching elegance. His influence, paramount at the present day in the Berlin University, is visible in many traits of character of his high-born pupil, which made the latter, at the age of twenty, what a shy old gentleman at Bonn once called in private conversation, "the delight of mankind." From Curtius's hands the Prince, in obedience to another tradition of his family, entered the First Regiment of Foot-Guards, stationed at Potsdam. His indefatigable instructor, Major Von der Groeben, exempted him from no duty that any other er-in-chief of the guards, who was respon- | ticles, disjointed from time immemorial, sible for the work done. The choice of Bonn for his life at college was an excellent one. A future sovereign ought, it is believed, to become intimate with every portion of the country. One of the most interesting provinces of had been firmly welded. As his parents chose Coblenz for their own residence, making that town for the time a sort of second capital of the kingdom, so was he brought up in the Rhenish university. There he lived, a merry youth with the young, and a genial, instruction-seeking | The present writer recollects his addressstudent with the old. If his arrival had been looked upon with some mistrust or dislike by the common people, to whom the name of Prussian was still a rebuke, he quickly vanquished that estrangement without any artifice of kingcraft beyond that of having an honest, civil word for everybody and remembering everybody. ing an urchin who suddenly emerged from a side lane with, "How now, boy? Surely you had not your arm in a sling when I saw you last?" The lad stared and then grinned, blubbered something about having had a fall on the ice and mother insisting upon his arm being tied up, as if that was any use, and ran away, |