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In the following year we find our engineer consulted, at the instance of the King of Sweden, on the best mode of constructing the Gotha Canal, between Lake Wenern and the Baltic, to complete the communication with the North Sea. In 1808, at the invitation of Count Platen, Mr. Telford visited Sweden and made a careful survey of the district.
"And if it were only the narrow-minded masses that persecuted noble men! But no! one gifted man and one genius persecutes another; Platen scandalizes Heine, and Heine Platen, and each seeks to make the other hateful; while the world is wide enough for all to live and to let live; and every one has an enemy in his own talent, who gives him quite enough to do.
On their way they always passed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine's hate would have delivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze; and there always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kaspar Hauser's fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain.
Two people so well disposed towards each other were very soon in the closest engagement; and the first proof Madame Platen gave him of her affection was introducing him to the favour of the Elector, who took it on her word that he was a young man of extraordinary merit, and he named him for Cofferer at his first accession to the Crown of England, and I believe it was the only place that he then disposed of from any inclination of his own.
Even in Italy, the land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic, lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen.
Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on her side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by his father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the latter by the Countess von Platen.
Then on another day he would come with a pad of paper, some crude home-made drawing tools, and pencils, and perching himself on a pile of rocks or of lumber would draw the machinery as a skilled draughtsman might, and then work over his sketch, apparently adding to it or altering it to suit ideas of his own. Count Platen watched the boy for several days, and then one morning went up to him.
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