While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.
"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under
very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace
at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess
Victoria Luise being present.
"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most
remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and
he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and
the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in
his position to be blase, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He
is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and
persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to
cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know
all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than
any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central
figures in all manner of world events, and thus learn at first hand,
from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest
them--which is to say, everything.
"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake
of courtesy to me, but that he has--or did have, then--an immense and
rather romantic interest in this country.
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