A benevolent old soul, I am sure, who in a New England
village would be universally called "Aunty," and would lay all the
rising generation under obligation to her for doughnuts and
sweet-cake. As she rises to go away, she scrapes together a
half-dozen shining chestnuts with her feet; and as she cannot
possibly stoop to pick them up, she motions to a boy playing near,
and smiles so happily as the urchin gathers them and runs away
without even a "thank ye."
A TASTE OF ULTRAMONTANISM
If that of which every German dreams, and so few are ready to take
any practical steps to attain,--German unity,--ever comes, it must
ride roughshod over the Romish clergy, for one thing. Of course
there are other obstacles. So long as beer is cheap, and songs of
the Fatherland are set to lilting strains, will these excellent
people "Ho, ho, my brothers," and "Hi, hi, my brothers," and wait for
fate, in the shape of some compelling Bismarck, to drive them into
anything more than the brotherhood of brown mugs of beer and Wagner's
mysterious music of the future. I am not sure, by the way, that the
music of Richard Wagner is not highly typical of the present (1868)
state of German unity,--an undefined longing which nobody exactly
understands. There are those who think they can discern in his music
the same revolutionary tendency which placed the composer on the
right side of a Dresden barricade in 1848, and who go so far as to
believe that the liberalism of the young King of Bavaria is not a
little due to his passion for the disorganizing operas of this
transcendental writer.
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