With a lovelier vision, reader! we could not leave you dwelling upon the rugged but, to the heart's core, thoroughly poetic Frieslander. Let us leave the gentle Demmarik and devoted Koite to their chaste and heavenly mission, and with a bound leap into Denmark, whither Mr Kohl, in his forty-fourth volume of travels, summons us, and whither we must follow him, although the prosaic gentleman is somewhat of the earth, earthy, after the blessed imitations we have had, reader--you and we--of the eternal summer's day faintly embodied in the vision of that long bright day of the far north!
Should any adventurous youth sit down to Mr Kohl's volume on Denmark, and, half an hour afterwards, throw the book in sheer disgust and weariness out of the window, swearing never to look into it again, let him be advised to ring the bell, and to request Mary to bring it back again with the least possible delay. Having received it from the maid of all work's horny hand, let the said youth begin the book again, but, as he would a Hebrew Bible, at the other end. He may take our word for it there is good stuff there, in spite of the twaddle that encountered him erewhile at Hamburg. Mr Kohl has been won by aldermanic dinners in the chief city of the Hanseatic League, as Louis Philippe was touched by aldermanic eloquence and wit in the chief city of the world, and he babbles of mercantile operations and commercial enterprise, until the heart grows sick with fatigue, and is only made happy by the regrets which the author expresses--just one hour after the right time--respecting his inability to enlarge further upon the fruitful and noble theme of the monetary speculations of one of the richest and most disagreeable communities of Europe.
Before putting foot on Danish ground, Mr Kohl is careful to make a kind of solemn protest touching Germanic patriotism, lest, we presume, he should be suspected of taking a heretical view of the question at issue at the present moment between the Sleswig-Holstein provinces and the mother-country Denmark. It is not for us to enter into any political discussions here, concerning matters of internal government which are no more business of ours than of his Majesty Muda Hassim, of the island of Borneo; but we must confess our inability to understand why such a terrific storm of patriotic ardour has so suddenly burst forth in Germany, respecting provinces which, until recently, certainly up to the time when the late king gave his people the unasked-for boon of a constitution, were perfectly happy and contented under the Danish rule, to which they had been accustomed some five or six hundred years.[2] It is only since the assembly of the states was constituted, that the Sleswig Holsteiners have been seized with the Germanic _furor_--a malady not a little increased by the inflammatory harangues of needy demagogues, and the pedantic outpourings of a handful of professors stark-mad on the subject of German liberty. If there is one thing more absurd than another, upon this globe of absurdity, it is the cant of "nationality," "freedom," "fatherland," "brotherhood," &c. &c., which is dinned into your ears from one end of Germany to the other; but which, like all other cants, is nothing but so much wind and froth, utterly without reason, stamina, or foundation. We should like to ask any mustached and bearded youth of Heidelberg or Bonn, at any one sober moment of his existence, to point out to us any single spot where this boasted "nationality" is to be seen and scanned. Will the red-capped, long-haired _Bursch_ tell us when and where we may behold that "vaterland" of which he is eternally dreaming, singing, and drinking? Why, is it not a fact that, to a Prussian, an Austrian or a Swabian is an alien? Does not a Saxe-Coburger, a Hessian, and any other subject of any small duchy or principality, insist, in his intense hatred of Prussia, that the Prussians are no Germans at all; that they have interests of their own, opposed to those of the true German people; and that they are as distinct as they are selfish? You cannot travel over the various countries and districts included under the name of Germany, without learning the thorough insulation of the component parts. The fact is forced upon you at every step. Mr Kohl himself belongs to none of the states mentioned. He is a native of Bremen--one of the cities of that proud Hanseatic League which certainly has never shown an enlarged or patriotic spirit with reference to this same universal "vaterland." Arrogant and lordly republics care little for abstractions. They have a keen instinct for their own material interests, but a small appreciation of the glorious ideal. We ask, again, where is this all pervading German patriotism?