After five days of troubled yet
joyous waiting, it came--the happy "climax," as the Prince called it in a
letter to Baron Stockmar--and then that perfectest flower of human life,
whether in palace or cottage, a pure and noble love, burst into full and
glorious bloom in each young heart. One cannot, even now, read without a
genuine heart-thrill, and a mistiness about the eyes, the simple touching
story of that royal romance of royal old Windsor. More than two-score
years have passed, and yet how fresh it seems! It has the dew and the
bloom of Paradise upon it.
What in all this story seems to me most beautiful and touching, because
so exquisitely womanly, is the meekness of the young Queen. Though as
Queen she offered the Prince her coveted hand--that hand that had held
the sceptre of sceptres, and which Princes and Peers and the
representatives of the highest powers on earth, had kissed in homage, it
was only as a poor little woman's weak hand, which needed to be upheld
and guided in good works, by a stronger, firmer hand; and her head, when
she laid it on her chosen husband's shoulder, had not the feel of the
crown on it. Indeed, she seems to have felt that his love was her real
coronation, his faith her consecration.
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