Untitled

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 923, 5 March 1881, Page 2

A Letter from Bismarck to his Wife in 1851.—The day before yesterday I went to Wiesbaden, and looked with a mixture of sadness and premature wisdom at the scenes of my former follies. If only it would please God to fill up with clear, strong wine the vessel in which at twenty-one the muddy champagne of youth frothed up to so little purpose! . . . How many of those with whom I have flirted and drank and ambled, are now under ground ! What changes my views of life have undergone in the fourteen years that have elapsed since that time, each in its turn seeming to me the correct one ; how much that I then thought great now appears small;. how much now seems honorable which I then despised! How much fresh foliage may still grow out of our inner man, airing shade, rustling in the wind, becoming worthless and faded, before another fourteen years are passed, before 1865, if only we live so long ! I cannot imagine how a man who thinks at all about himself, and yet refuses to hear anything about God, can endure life without weariness and self-abhorrence. I can’t think how I endured it formerly. If I had to live now as then—without God, without you, without children—l don’t know why I should not throw off this life like a dirty shirt; and yet most of my acquaintances are so and live their life.