May it please God to fill with His clear and strong wine this vessel in which the champagne of twenty-one years foamed so uselessly....

I do not understand how a man who reflects on himself, and still knows, and will know, nothing of God, can endure his life for contempt and weariness.

I do not know how I endured this in old days; if, as then, I were to live without God, thee, and the children, I do not know why I should not put life aside like a dirty shirt; and yet most of my acquaintances live thus." Now let us see what he thinks of his new duties: "Our intercourse here is at best nothing but a mutual suspicion and espionage; if only there was anything to spy out and to hide! It is pure trifles with which they worry themselves, and I find these diplomatists with their airs of confidence and their petty fussiness much more absurd than the member of the Second Chamber in his conscious dignity.

Unless some external events take place, and we clever men of the Diet can neither direct nor foresee them, I know already what we shall bring about in one or two or three years, and will do it in twenty-four hours if the others will only be reasonable and truthful for a single day.

I am making tremendous progress in the art of saying nothing in many words; I write reports many pages long, which are smooth and finished like leading articles, and if Manteuffel after reading them can say what they contain, he can do more than I.We all do as though we believed of each other that we are full of thoughts and plans, if only we would express them, and all the time we none of us know a hair's breadth more what will become of Germany." Of the Austrian Envoy who was President of the Diet he writes: "Thun in his outward appearance has something of a hearty good fellow mixed with a touch of the Vienna _roue_.