PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 5,745 pages of information about PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete.

PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 5,745 pages of information about PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete.
young men and women now unborn with the admiration which the Philip Sidneys and the Max Piccolominis now inspire.  After all, what was your Chevy Chace to stir blood with like a trumpet?  What noble principle, what deathless interest, was there at stake?  Nothing but a bloody fight between a lot of noble gamekeepers on one side and of noble poachers on the other.  And because they fought well and hacked each other to pieces like devils, they have been heroes for centuries.”

The letter was written in a very excited state of feeling, and runs over with passionate love of country and indignation at the want of sympathy with the cause of freedom which he had found in quarters where he had not expected such coldness or hostile tendencies.

From a letter dated Vienna, September 22, 1863.

. . .  “When you wrote me last you said on general matters this:  ’In a few days we shall get the news of the success or failure of the attacks on Port Hudson and Vicksburg.  If both are successful, many will say that the whole matter is about settled.’  You may suppose that when I got the great news I shook hands warmly with you in the spirit across the Atlantic.  Day by day for so long we had been hoping to hear the fall of Vicksburg.  At last when that little concentrated telegram came, announcing Vicksburg and Gettysburg on the same day and in two lines, I found myself almost alone. . . .  There was nobody in the house to join in my huzzahs but my youngest infant.  And my conduct very much resembled that of the excellent Philip ii. when he heard the fall of Antwerp,—­for I went to her door, screeching through the key-hole ‘Vicksburg is ours!’ just as that other ‘pere de famille,’ more potent, but I trust not more respectable than I, conveyed the news to his Infanta. (Fide, for the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt.  You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other’s necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture my isolation.
“I have never faltered in my faith, and in the darkest hours, when misfortunes seemed thronging most thickly upon us, I have never felt the want of anything to lean against; but I own I did feel like shaking hands with a few hundred people when I heard of our Fourth of July, 1863, work, and should like to have heard and joined in an American cheer or two.
“I have not much to say of matters here to interest you.  We have had an intensely hot, historically hot, and very long and very dry summer.  I never knew before what a drought meant.  In Hungary the suffering is great,
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PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.