At another time he writes:
“The deplorable frivolity of these times is one of their worst signs. I find it the saddest of all. Would that one could hope,
“When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the night is past and gone,”
that things would come right again. But moral nights are not as physical ones. The latter bring us dreams which the dawn of day dispels. The moral nights are full of the feverish dreams of mankind, and they have no certain limit as to time. They go crescendo from error to folly, until the awakening at the end of a completed, comet-like course of misery.”
We have mentioned Stolberg’s warm love of his country. Prince Francis Fürstenberg said of him during the time of the humbling of Germany under the yoke of Napoleon: “I know, and have known in my long life, many of the noblest men in the nation, but I saw none surpass Stolberg in genuine love for the Fatherland. His German and imperial heart is pure as gold and shines like a diamond.” The epithet imperial sounds odd to our ears; it is an allusion to his belief that the Empire of Germany, such as it existed just before the Congress of Vienna, was the proper representative and bulwark of the nation. He blamed the Emperor Francis very strongly for laying down his time-honored dignity later on, and contenting himself with a local title which severed his interests materially from those of Germany at large. He also saw in this withdrawal of imperial authority and protection over non-Austrian countries a danger to the Catholic faith, and a possible interference of Protestant powers in the communications between Catholic German states and the Holy See. But concerning the ever-vexed question of the Rhine frontier his patriotism was quick and hot; he wished that in the new partition at the Congress Alsace and Lorraine should be given back to Germany, and lamented the injudicious behavior by which some of the German troops had spoilt the evidently favorable state of mind of the Alsatians during part of the disturbances on the frontier.
“Eighteen months ago,” he writes in 1815, “the Alsatians were very well disposed, came to meet our troops with flags and received them with ringing of joy-bells; then came the Bavarians, the Badeners, and so on, and behaved so as to make them hate us. We all talk of our wish to reunite our once torn-away brethren with Germany, but we have angered them instead and are burning their towns and villages. My hair stands on end and I could weep tears of blood at the thought.”
Early in the century, a few weeks after his conversion, Stolberg wrote thus to Princess Gallitzin:
“True patriotism embraces the highest good of the people in all things: the blessings of faith, those of law, of freedom, and of morals. It can never follow the path of forcible overthrows and of revolution, nor covenant with an outside enemy, nor lend itself to the service of injustice, even when a seeming and momentary advantage is to be gained by such service. What a disgrace for us Germans is the Franco-mania that reigns among us—the cap-in-hand alliance with the Corsican adventurer, who is spreading horror and desolation among us and knows no right but that of the sword. What undermines all our strength, and will sink us even lower and lower, is not only the jealousy and spirit of aggrandizement current among the German states against the empire and the emperor, the fawning on the French with the hope of getting their help to win new slices of territory, but far more the weakened character of the whole people, and their want of moral energy and good feeling—the result of the unbelieving philosophy and immoral literature that have unnerved the nation.”
Just as impartially he condemned in after-years, when German patriotism had spread with a sudden rush from the field into literature, the “coarse Teutonism” which rejected every refinement of foreign origin, maligned every foreign custom, and made patriotism ridiculous by enjoining upon it to be no less than rabid. He then defended all that was reasonable and applicable to German life, all the praise-worthy customs, books, and improvements that fashion had turned suddenly against. He had earned a good right to be independent; for four of his sons fought in the different German armies that overwhelmed Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow, and one, his son Christian, a brave boy of eighteen, died at the battle of Ligny. His two sons-in-law also, fathers of large families of young children, were in the national army, and the greatest enthusiasm was felt by all the members of the family, old and young, for the cause which Stolberg called “ours, God’s, Europe’s, mankind’s, and the right’s.”