If, during my operatic evenings at Berlin, I was provokingly disappointed in Germany, I had rich compensation in some of my mornings, which were most delightfully spent, a certain lassitude of body and depression of spirit allowed for; which, rather than lay it to the account of a vexed musical spirit, I will make bold to ascribe to miasma from the Spree, that blackest and most canal-like of streams. There was the morning idled away at Potsdam, among the terraces which, height above height, rise by a stately and formal gradation of steps and platforms from the great avenue of the New Palace to Sans Souci, — that Prussian Trianon, where Frederic the Great wrote and Voltaire flattered him. It was not permitted me to enter and see the relics of the monarch and his familiar, as the present King of Prussia (then Crown Prince) was, at the time of my visit, sojourning there, to take his part in the autumn reviews. But the best relics, after all, are those that Memory has in store: so, little disappointed, I lingered among the gigantic golden pumpkins and the vines which clothe the front of the terraces (these eatables being more plentiful and curiously tended than the flowers, which would have the first care in an English royal “policy”), thinking of the days that garden had seen, and how like it was to some decoration which a Watteau would have thrown off, or a Mondonville have bespoken for the show-scene of one of his grand operas.