The exultation among the crowned heads in Europe in view of this great monarchical victory was unbounded. England immediately created Nelson Baron of the Nile, and conferred a pension of ten thousand dollars a year, to be continued to his two immediate successors. The Grand Signior, the Emperor of Russia, the King of Sardinia, the King of Naples, and the East India Company made him magnificent presents. Despotism upon the Continent, which had received such heavy blows from Napoleon, began to rejoice and to revive. The newly emancipated people, struggling into the life of liberty, were disheartened. Exultant England formed new combinations of banded kings, to replace the Bourbons on their throne, and to crush the spirit of popular liberty and equality, which had obtained such a foothold in France. All monarchical Europe rejoiced. All republican Europe mourned.
The day of Aboukir was indeed a disastrous day to France. Napoleon with his intimate friends did not conceal his conviction of the magnitude of the calamity. He appeared occasionally, for a moment, lost in painful reverie, and was heard two or three times to exclaim, in indescribable tones of emotion, “Unfortunate Brueys, what have you done.” But hardly an hour elapsed after he had received the dreadful tidings, ere he entirely recovered his accustomed fortitude, and presence of mind, and he soon succeeded in allaying the despair of the soldiers. He saw, at a glance, all the consequences of this irreparable loss. And it speaks well for his heart that in the midst of a disappointment so
terrible, he could have forgotten his own grief in writing a letter of condolence to the widow of his friend. A heartless man could never have penned so touching an epistle as the following addressed to Madame Brueys, the widow of the man who had been unintentionally the cause of apparently the greatest calamity which could have befallen him.
“Your husband has been killed by a cannon ball, while combating on his quarter deck. He died without suffering—the death the most easy and the most envied by the brave. I feel warmly for your grief. The moment which separates us from the object which we love is terrible; we feel isolated on the earth; we almost experience the convulsions of the last agony; the faculties of the soul are annihilated; its connection with the earth is preserved only through the medium of a painful dream, which disturbs every thing. We feel, in such a situation, that there is nothing which yet binds us to life; that it were far better to die. But when, after such just and unavoidable throes, we press our children to our hearts, tears and more tender sentiments arise, and life becomes bearable for their sakes. Yes, Madame! they will open the fountains of your heart. You will watch their childhood, educate their youth. You will speak to them of their father, of your present grief, and of the loss which they and the Republic have sustained in his death. After having resumed the interests in life by the chord of maternal love, you will perhaps feel some consolation from the friendship and warm interest which I shall ever take in the widow of my friend.”
The French soldiers with the versatility of disposition which has ever characterized the light-hearted nation, finding all possibility of a return to France cut off, soon regained their accustomed gayety, and with zeal engaged in all the plans of Napoleon, for the improvement of the country, which it now appeared that, for many years, must be their home.
THE GERMAN EMIGRANTS—A SKETCH OF LIFE.
BY JOHN DOGGETT, JUN.
A few years ago, while wandering a stranger along the quay at Albany, my attention was attracted to a crowd composed for the most part of persons about to depart by a canal-packet for Buffalo. The scene was to me one of some interest, as a number of Germans of the better class were among the passengers. One was a beautiful girl apparently of about the age of eighteen, arrayed in the simple, unaffected garb of her country, but whose intellectual features, black and lustrous hair, tall and elegant figure, and somewhat melancholy cast of countenance, rendered her an object of interest, perhaps, I may say of admiration, to the bystanders. I noticed the sweet, sad smile which occasionally enlivened her countenance as fondly holding the hand of her companion in her own, she spoke to him in a tone and with a frankness of manner, that betrayed a deep and abiding interest in his welfare. I was informed that this young man was her only brother, who had been for some months employed in a manufacturing establishment in Albany; that his sister, however, had but recently arrived in the country, and, accompanied by her uncle, was now about to depart on a pilgrimage to the distant West.