There strength on coward weakness
In cruel might will roll;
Beauty and joy are cankers
That eat away the soul;
And love— O God, avenge it—
The plague-spot of the whole.

Man's world is Pain and Terror,
He found it pure and fair,
And wove in nets of sorrow
The golden summer air.
Black, hideous, cold and dreary,
Man's curse, not God's, is there.

And yet God's world is speaking:
Man will not hear it call;
But listens where the echoes
Of his own discords fall,
Then clamours back to Heaven
That God has done it all.

APPRENTICESHIP OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.

MR. CARLYLE, as most of our readers
know, has for some time been very hard at
work upon the story of the famous King of
Prussia, Frederick the Great. Because it
was believed that he would for the first time
tell as a living truth what is perhaps the
most notable feature in the history of the
last century, men have looked forward to the
publication of his book with a great deal of
curiosity. The first half of the book, in two
thick volumes, has just now appeared.

Here we read through what sort of training,
and in what sort of kingdom, Frederick;
at the age of twenty-eight, came to his
father's throne. The volumes end with the
death of his father; and the vital fact in
them, so far as regards the life of Frederick,
is, that he served as apprentice to his father,
and only through the training of a hard
apprenticeship passed on to the condition of
a Master King. Following Mr. Carlyle's
views of the subject he has studied, and often
slipping purposely into his own words, we
propose now to sketch some of the main
features of this very curious apprenticeship.

It is necessary to begin with a word or
two concerning the grandfather of Frederick;
Friedrich the First, in whose reign Prussia
became a kingdom. Him we find generally
characterised as The expensive Herr. He
had been jolted out of a coach in infancy, and
gone through life ever thereafter with a
broken back, and a thin skin. Ever regardless
of expense, when, from his chrysalis state
of Elector of Brandenburg, he developed into
the most magnificent of butterflies as King of
Prussia, he laboured to be lavish. He would
be crowned in Konigsberg, and ordered
thirty thousand post-horses, in addition to
his large stud, for the journey thither, which
was made in eighteen hundred carriages.
The diamond buttons of his coat cost fifteen
hundred pounds a-piece. By this one feature
judge what an expensive Herr! His wife,
Sophia Charlotte, was a shrewd and lively
woman, with a touch of scepticism, and a
taste for philosophical discussion of a certain
kind. "Beyond doubt, a bright, airy lady,
skilled to speak, skilled to hold her tongue,—
which latter art was also frequently in
requisition with her. She did not much
venerate her husband, or the people, male or
female, which he chose to have about him:
his and their ways were by no means hers, if
she had cared to publish her thoughts" It
is she who wrote,  "Leibnitz talked to me
about the infinitely little. Mon Dieu! as if
I did not know enough of that." To the
consternation of her husband, she was
observed to take a pinch of snuff, by way of
consolation, over the long-winded coronation
ceremonies.

The son and heir of this couple was the
father and the master of King Frederick the
Great. This son and heir was a rough cub of
a boy, who swallowed a shoe-buckle in his
infancy, and in early childhood conquered his
governess by swinging himself outside a
three-story window until she complied with
his desire. When on a visit to his uncle, he
gave his cousin, afterwards our George the
second, a bloody nose, and saw another little
cousin, Sophie Dorothea, whom afterwards
he married. This mother of King Frederick
the Great, with a face handsome, wholesome,
and affectionate; blond, florid, and slightly
profuse; royally impatient, loyally patient,
with a temper tending towards the obstinate
and quietly unchangeable; was a good wife
to her solid, obstinate, if somewhat explosive
bear, who called her his Pheekin, and he
began the business of life with her on the
best of terms. "She brought him gradually
no fewer than fourteen children, of whom ten
survived him and came to maturity; and it
is to be admitted, their conjugal relation,
though a royal, was always a human one;
the main elements of it strictly observed on
both sides; all quarrels in it capable of being
healed again, and the feeling on both sides
true, however troublous."

To this couple the child who lived to be
known as Frederick the Great was born, on
the twenty-fourth of January, in the year
seventeen hundred and twelve. "His father,
they say, was like to have stifled him with
his caresses, so overjoyed was the man, or at
least to have scorched him in the blaze of
the fire; when happily some much suitabler
female nurse snatched the little creature from
the rough paternal paws, and saved it for the
benefit of Prussia and mankind. If Heaven
will but please to grant it length of life; for
there have already been two little princekins
who are both dead; this Frederick is the
fourth child; and only one little girl, wise
Wilhelmina, of almost too sharp wits, and
not too vivacious aspect, is otherwise yet here
of royal progeny." They who were not
content with teething as a cause of death, said
that one little prince had been killed by the
noise of the cannon firing for joy over it;