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O Loveland of the Poets, In the hour of your pain, Does Garibaldi's promise To your heroes hold again? There were fisher lads among them, In the shirt of peasant red, And mountaineers from Tyrol, When Garibaldi said: "I have no prayer to make you, For to God alone I kneel! I have no price to pay you, For your wage is Austrian steel! "There is naught of knightly emblem For the honor of the brave, And the only land I grant you Will be length to mark your grave! "I promise cold and hunger In the stead of drink and meat! I promise death, my brothers, Shall be yours before defeat!" O Sweetheart of the Nations, In the hour of your pain, Does Garibaldi's promise To Italia hold again? |
The Uncivilizable Nation
By Emile Verhaeren.
The Belgian poet whom Maurice Maeterlinck preferred should rank among the Immortals of the French Academy when that honor was bestowed upon himself, has contributed to Les Annales the following account of Germany and the German people. The translation is that appearing on June 11 in The Suffragette of England.
LIFE is not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their thoughts or by their deeds.
Germany behaves as though it were the most backward among nations. And indeed it is in spite of appearances essentially feudal. There is perhaps a German culture, but there is no German civilization.
One may be well informed and yet be hardly civilized. A sense of duty to humanity, a sense of pride, a sense of liberty are independent, certainly not of intelligence, but are independent of mere knowledge of accumulated facts.
The German professor is a walking library. He collects, he arranges, he comments. Arrangement and discipline with him take the place of everything else, and they inculcate in him the spirit of dependence and of servility. It is perhaps because he classifies so much that he is so dully submissive. Everything according to his view is an ascending or descending scale. Everything is in its compartment.
How, then, can we be surprised if everything becomes materialized and the mind of each Teuton can lay claim to be nothing more than a sort of stiff and dingy compartment, in a sort of social chessboard.