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No. 37. — Vienna, 16 September 1898. — Second Year.

The Empress Elisabeth.

A deep and agonising grief has come over the peoples of Austria. They have lost their Empress. No, not lost. She has been robbed from them insidiously, cravenly, basely. We do not stand at the bier of a princess who, in accordance with eternal law, has rendered her tribute to nature. The murderous steel of a madman has torn her out of the full life newly bestowed upon her. A madman! Only such a one could lay hands upon this woman, only one forsaken by God and by men could commit this ignominious crime. More than any other princess, our Empress had the sympathising love of her peoples to rejoice in; for more than any other she had suffered. Walking upon the heights of humanity, seemingly in possession of all that can make men happy, she was obliged to know the bitterest sorrows. The exalted rank which the throne conferred upon her she ennobled through the exaltation of her life and of her suffering. A sufferer, she passed through a life that had denied her nothing of outward splendour. She scarcely heeded it. Her soul, capable of the highest knowledge and the highest feeling, purified in sorrow, had unfolded into full beauty and had raised itself high above the commonplace in the sublime temple of art, in the sacred halls of poetry. The white walls of the Achilleion greet the blue waters in eternal beauty, a monument more glorious than any prince has yet raised for himself. And within, conjured in stone, the fairy-tale image of the poet to whom an Empress, to whom this Empress, showed honour and fidelity when he was reviled by those whose poetic renown he had helped to win. What she did for the singer of Jehuda Halevy in the face of a whole world of envious little epigones is one testimony more to the luminous height of thinking and feeling upon which she stood. Far from the pomp of her station, which may well have been a vexatious fetter upon the upward flight of her soul, she had cast from her all the shackles of prejudice and of the timid spirit of caste. To all good men she was intimately bound; in the communion of the noble she took her high seat. Helpful she was, and good. Full of her own sorrows, she felt deeply those of others, and with the gentle, consoling hand of a mother tried by grief she assuaged all the bitternesses of the afflicted whom she knew. And a human being could lay a hand upon this woman, a human being could kill her! For this woman, who did evil to no one and good to all, a murderer could lie in wait; an assassin could strike her down at his leisure, because another victim, for whom he had intended his murderous steel, had escaped him! With deep compassion one thinks of the man from whom such a wife has been so frightfully torn; one thinks of the Emperor who, after so many heavy blows of fate, was not to be spared even the most appalling. In his jubilee year, when peoples and princes were preparing to show him the proofs of their joyful participation in especial splendour, death with inexorable hand has robbed him of the best he had. The choir of those filled with joy has become a choir of mourners, and it is as though one heard, shuddering and solemn, the choragus:

"My heart grows heavy in the palaces of princes,
When from the summit of fortune I see
The highest, the best come plunging down
In the swiftness of an instant!"

But in his deep affliction the Emperor becomes only the dearer to all those who would have come to share his joy. Against his firm, unbroken manly courage this terrible blow too will shake in vain. In gentle melancholy the pain will find release, and, mourning with their sovereign, the love of his peoples will weep over the calamity and cover over the crime.