ABSTRACT
There is a savour of romance in the childhood of the second Hohenzollern ruler of Brandenburg, the second son of four whom “Elsa the Beautiful” bore to her husband. At eight years of age the boy was sent to the Polish Court, there to be brought up as the betrothed of the little Princess Jadwiga and as heir-apparent to the Polish throne. But cleverly as his father had contrived the policy which had brought these things to pass, he had not reckoned with the almost miraculous fact that a youthful fourth wife of the aged Polish King would present her husband with three sons. It requires small penetration to see that this startling threefold event must have considerably damped the delights of the young Hohenzollern Prince’s stay in Warsaw. His future wife’s stepmother, in particular, felt that the foreign lad was very much in the way, and did all she could to speed him on his homeward journey to Brandenburg. The young Prince, however, despite slights and humiliations, clung to his gentle, snow-white Jadwiga, and, indeed, could not be torn from her till his poor little bride died—who knows how!—at the early age of eighteen. Not till then, when he had no longer any place at all in Warsaw, did Frederick return to his German home. It is said that he subsequently showed signs of melancholia, and feared for the loss of his own reason. We are told, too, that he preserved a romantic adoration for his dead bride beyond the grave. Whether or not he composed verses to his lost little Polish Princess is unknown, but most of the Hohenzollerns have been without a feeling for poetry. There are a few exceptions to this rule: Frederick the Great was one; a certain sentimental Prince George of 30Prussia, son of the laconic Frederick William III’s eloquent brother, who wrote a dozen or so worthless dramas under the name of “G. Conrad,” and, in our own days, Ernst von Wildenbruch, were others.
