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Austria

Austria image
Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
December
Year
1846
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

Austria. This powerful monarchy, with a territory superior, and a population equal to that of France, is composed of four distinct nations, each speaking different languages, and governed by widely varying customs, and laws. There is Hungary, a world by itself; gloomy in its untamed, uncivilized wilderness; where the rocky castles of proud barons still frown upon the cliffs, as stable, as impregnable, as sombre in their semi-barbarian gloom, as in the darkest morning of the dark ages; and courtly men and high born dames move in those feudal halls, while the menial serfs, retaining the dress, the manners and the mind of generations long since buried in oblivion, hover for protection in their miserable hovels around their lord: proud of their servitude, desiring no change, and never dreaming that I they were born for noble destiny. Hungary is the twelfth century dwelling in the nineteenth; it is a picture of the middle ages framed in central Europe. There is Bohemia, with its obsequious peasantry, its haughty nobility, its nominal constitution, with its mockery of a legislalure, unendowed even with the shadow of power. lts members, the dishonored tools of absolutism, can only deliberate upon the means of executing the king's commands, with no liberty to suggest anything, or even to petition for favor of redress. There is Tyrol, the land of romance and of song: with her beetling cliffs, her gushing fountains, her roaring torrents, and her delicious mountain rills; and where the traveler passing through the secluded Alpine ravines, often sees through the latticed windows, the gathered family kneeling around the humble fireside, in the offering of their vesper praise; or is warned of his approach to human habitations, by hearing the notes of their evening minstrelsy, floating through the silence and solitude of the forest. There is Austria proper, the nucleus of this vast kingdom, the kernal of the nut, divided by the Danube, Europe's great artery; embellished by the voluptuous capital Vienna, unquestionably the most dissolute city in Christendom, where worldly pleasure in unrestrained indulgence ever holds its high carnival; where noble ladies, frivolous and unlettered, are merely those "pretty nothings" which help to adorn a ball-room, scarcely conscious that they have either reason or souls; whire high-born men, exulting in their illustrious ancestry, have no nobler object in life than flirtation, waltzing, and the gaming-table; where all the noblest energies of the mind are crushed by the incubus of absolutism which overshadows the land; and where the peasantry, impoverished and imbecile, hug the chains which bind them, and never desire or dream, even, of a more enviable lot. The German, the Italian, the Hungarian, the Bohemian, the Illyrian and the Wallachian are among the conglomerated provinces and empires of this heterogeneous realm. And they are all slumbering together, in utter unconsciousness of the progress of the nineteenth century. And when the Emperor Ferdinand gathers around his throne the thunderbolts of war, and unfurls his eagles, there rally, at the sound of the music of the Austrian bands, the submissive peasantry of all these provinces ready to march to the slaughter for a sixpence a day. And they willingly assemble, with no murmurs of discontent. There is infinitely more political dissatisfaction under the almost boundless liberty of the United States, than exists under the utter despotism of Austria.