Yes—Rainbow of my ruined youth,
Now shining o'er the wreck in vain!
Thy rosy tints of grace and truth
Life's evening clouds shall long retain.
My very doom has less of pain
To feel that, ere from Time's dark river
Thy form or soul could take one stain,
Despair between us came for ever.
IX.
And if, as sages still avow,
The rites once paid on hill and grove
To Beings beautiful as thou,
To Dian, Hebe, and to Love,
Were so imperishably wove
Of fancies lovely and elysian,
Their spirit to this hour must rove
The earth a blest abiding vision;[29]
X.
Then surely round that mountain rude,
And Bridgeton's rill and pathway lone,
In years to come, when thon, the Wooed,
And thy fond Worshipper are gone,
Each suppliant prayer, each ardent tone,
Each vow the heart could once supply,
Whose every pulse was there thine own,
In many an evening breeze will sigh.
AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY.
We have been so much accustomed to regard the Austrian empire as one German nation, that we sometimes forget of how many separate kingdoms and principalities it consists, and of how many different and disunited races its population is composed. It may not, therefore, be unnecessary to recall attention to the fact that the Austrian dominions of the last three hundred years—the Austrian empire of our times—consists of three kingdoms and many minor principalities, inhabited by five distinct races, whose native tongues are unintelligible to each other, and who have no common language in which they can communicate; who are divided by religious differences; who preserve their distinctive characteristics, customs, and feelings; whose sentiments are mutually unfriendly, and who are, to this day, unmixed in blood. The Germans, the Italians, the Majjars or Hungarians, the Sclaves, and the Wallacks, are distinct and alien races—without community of origin, of language, of religion, or of sentiments. Except the memory of triumphs and disasters common to them all, their allegiance to one sovereign is now, as it was three centuries ago, the only bond that unites them. Yet, in all the vicissitudes of fortune—some of them disastrous—which this empire has survived, these nations and races have held together. The inference is inevitable—whatever may have been its defects, that form of government could not have been altogether unfit for its purposes, which so many different kingdoms and races united to support and maintain.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these various states were under one form of government. There were almost as many forms of government as there were principalities; but they were all monarchical, and one sovereign happened to become the monarch of the whole. The house of Hapsburg, in which the imperial crown of Germany, the regal crowns of Hungary, Bohemia, and Lombardy, and the ducal crowns of Austria, Styria, the Tyrol, and nearly a dozen other principalities, became hereditary, acquired their possessions, not by conquest, but by election, succession, or other legitimate titles[30] recognised by the people. The descendants of Rodolph thus became the sovereigns of many separate states, each of which retained, as a matter of right, its own constitution. The sovereign, his chief advisers, and the principal officers of state at his court, were usually Germans by birth, or by education and predilection; but the constitution of each state—the internal administration, and those parts of the machinery of government with which the people came more immediately into contact—were their own. In some we find the monarchy elective, as in Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria; in all we find diets of representatives or delegates, chosen by certain classes of the people, without whose concurrence taxes could not be imposed, troops levied, or legislative measures enacted; and we find municipal institutions founded on a broad basis of representation. In none of them was the form of government originally despotic.