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seven of the Sonderbund, and the representatives of the latter withdrew from the diet, after pronouncing a long and very able manifesto, in which, after summing up their historical argument, they conclude:

"The governments of the twelve states of Berne, Zurich, Glaris, Solothurn, Shaffhausen, sino, Vaud, and Geneva, have drawn the sword St. Gall, the Grisons, Argow, Thurgow, Tesfor an unjust war. The governments and inhabitants of the states of Lucerne, Uri, Schwytz, Unterwalden, Zug, Friburg, and the Valais, will draw theirs in their legitimate defence. A sacred oath unites you to us-you, confederates of the states whose authorities lead you to a sanguinary war against us; you are sworn, as well as we, to faithfully and constantly maintain the confederated alliance, and to sacrifice for it, if necessary, your lives and your property.

bare majority of twelve cantonal votes | declared by twelve canons against the would have sufficed them for an excuse. In this diet the canton of St. Gall was equally divided, and so had no vote; before the diet of 1847 had assembled, the radicals had gained the power in this canton. There was then but one canton wanting to give them a majority, and it is instructive to read how it was gained. The aristocratical canton of Geneva was nearly equally divided between Catholics and Protestants; and again these were subdivided into radicals and conservatives. Several years before, the radicals were in power, and the conservative party, which in this canton was nearly coincident with the aristocratic, had regained their influence mainly by the zealous, though unorganized, adhesion of a larger number of the Catholics to their interest. But when this party had once more the reins of government in their hands, they interfered officially with the ecclesiastical appointments of the Catholics, especially in the appointment of their curate in the city of Geneva. The disaffection that this produced in the minds of the Catholics in Geneva towards the government was very great; and therefore when the radicals on the 8th October, 1846, raised the standard of revolt against the council of the canton, though the insurgents were inconsiderable in number, and confined to the faubourg St. Gervaise, the government was yet astonished to find itself without support, and was forced to abdicate. The next day the organ of the Catholics, after bitterly recounting the interferences of the late council with church matters, concluded by expressing an entire sympathy with any new state of affairs whatever, which would only establish liberty in religious matters. This sufficiently indicated the cause of the disaffection, and while we cannot esteem it a large-minded, or a wise policy, in such a position of the Swiss confederation, we must yet acknowledge that it was a result to be naturally expected. However, it threw Geneva into the hands of the radicals; and so by this passiveness of the Genevese Catholics, the radicals, in the diet of 1847, gained their long-sought majority of twelve cantons out of the twenty-two, for the forcible suppression of the Sonderbunnd.

The result is well known. Last year, after a short and stormy session, war was

"But your authorities tear up the alliance and make war upon the confederates and the founders of the confederation. You are called upon to shed your blood to execute their decree against the confederation. You are called upon to sacrifice your property to despoil that of your faithful confederates. You have taken with us a sacred oath to contribute to the prosperity of our common country, and to protect it against all calamity; yet your authorities are plunging the country into civil war, not to proagainst confederates. They are precipitating mote its prosperity, but to execute their decree the confederation, which is the admiration of all nations, into the abyss where it must meet with destruction, and instead of watching over the prosperity of each particular state, they desire to destroy the liberty and sovereignty of the seven cantons. You have sworn to live with us as brothers in good and in bad fortune. Have we not always kept our oath? Have we not always rejoiced when you were happy? Have we not always shared your misfortunes? Have we ever shackled your independence and your rights? Your authorities, however, in the midst of peace, have destroyed our Catholic institutions, and it was from your territory that came the attacks of the free corps against one Your authorities have kept up these bands, and of our cantons, which they plunged in distress. wish now by civil war to carry out to the highest point the offences of which they were guilty. You have sworn, as well as we, to do all that honor and duty impose on faithful confederates. Mention to us a duty which we have not fulfilled towards you. Your authorities substitute arbitrary commands for the duties they owe us; they support traitors and assassins; they grant no protection to our innocent fellow-citizens, destroy our commerce, carry off our property, invest our frontiers, and declare war against us

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As was anticipated, the first attack of the free corps and their auxiliaries was directed upon Friburg, which was isolated from its allies, and exposed in its situation. The number of the radical troops was over 30,000 men; the army of Friburg, including boys of fourteen years, who bore the fatigues of the campaign with the valor of men, did not exceed the third of the number; yet, singular to say, the opinion among the private soldiers on each side was the same, namely, that the invaders would be defeated. The Friburgers united the impetuosity of religious enthusiasm to the obedient discipline of German coolness. Whilst preparing for the attack, after laboring all day long in a cold rain in throwing up redoubts, when the different companies had returned to their quarters, they did not lie down for the repose of the night, till old and young, with their officers as leaders of their devotions, had with many prayers invoked the blessings and protection of God on themselves and on their country. The superior of a religious community in Friburg happening to behold a company of them so engaged, assembled the members of his convent and took them to the spot, to learn there a lesson of fortitude and faith. And when, at length, the enemy were in sight, and the moment of combat imminent, their martial music, which was attuned to religious hymns, in which the entire army joined, would cease, only to give place to shouts of joyful defiance, and unbounded confidence.

On the side of the invaders, according to their own after-account, the case was precisely contrary. One would say: It is in vain to attack Friburg,-every man of them is anxious to die in its defence. And another would answer: The Friburgers have right on their side; we ought not to attack them nor to succeed. And many expressed their firm resolution of firing over the heads of their Friburg brethren.

VOL. II. NO. I. NEW SERIES.

6

It is therefore not strange that as they approached the town, the whole army was panic-struck and looked on a defeat as certain. How then came the result to be so different?

Since commencing this article, we have found opportunity to converse with an Italian gentleman, who happened to be in Friburg during the whole affair; and his report fully confirms the idea that we had already formed, and which was openly advanced in l' Universe, l'Union Monarchique, and some other papers. It is impossible to doubt that the Friburgers were betrayed, and the past history of Maillardoz, who on account of his superior rank was put at the head of their army, gives full reason for believing that he was the wretched traitor. No amount of cowardice seems capable of otherwise explaining his conduct. The officers next in command desired to have met the invaders on the confines of the canton, and were sure of chasing them at all points. He kept them in inaction around the walls of the city. The dispositions that he made relatively to the defence of the outworks, show that he was in communication with the enemy, and meant them to take these by surprise. And the brilliant action which prevented this, by the valor of the merest handful of Friburgers, was commenced by a private soldier, contrary to his orders, firing à piece of artillery from one of the redoubts on the advancing column of the enemy, because common sense told the man that treason alone could permit them to march thus into their encampment unopposed. And when Maillardoz came from his quarters at the sound of the skirmish, his first order was to withdraw his troops from following up an advantage, which would otherwise have put to the rout the whole body of the invaders.

Persons in the radical ranks afterwards told our informant that the slightest show of resistance would have checked and defeated them, for that they had no confidence in their cause or in their men. But Maillardoz sent to them demanding a truce, and to treat of a capitulation. He then summoned a council of war, declared his despair of resistance, and resigned his commission. There were others, either corrupted or weak-minded, who were struck with alarm. Discord appeared in the

council; they had no leader, and so they fell without resistance. When the troops of Friburg saw themselves thus betrayed, their mortification was intense. Some of them refused to lay down their arms; others broke their guns to pieces and tore off their military dress, as a disgraced badge.

The fall of Friburg inexplicably dismayed the other cantons of the Sonderbund. The radicals marched unopposed into them, one after another; and in each one, they have outlawed those who have been engaged in the defence of cantonal sovereignty, that is, the inhabitants proper of these cantons; they have constituted the army of radical occupation as the recognized voters, and proceeding thus from one canton to another, they have forced a new government on nearly all of the conservatives.

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their grief, to the God of their fathers. We know that people who pray never despair, and moreover, we believe as they do, that there is a God who hears them, and who will yet vindicate his justice. Switzerland, which afforded the brightest example of liberty, by preserving always her original constitution, while during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all around her, France, Germany and Northern Italy, suffered theirs to be swallowed up in monarchical despotism, will not now be lost.

Before radical fury had desecrated the hospitable valley of Einsiedlen, a traveller stopped one day at "Our Lady of Hermits." The heat of summer was now passed, and the richness of the fields was already touched by the finger of the decaying year. An Alpine mist was settling over all the valley. The next day the traveller walked hither and thither among the granges, and saw in the landscape nothing but obscure and watery clouds. But on the third day, as he walked on the top of a neighboring hill, the sun came forth above, and favorable winds assisted to dispel the cloudy vapors, and as he rested there for a little while, the vision of the valley became clear. And as far as his

Such has been Swiss liberalism! Such has been its radical reform! The horrors it has committed against religion and humanity are fresh in the minds of all. Our intention has been to give not a narration of these, but a view of the principles and party from which they have sprung: that they are not accidental excesses, but the substantial reforms of the progressive democracy of Switzerland. And we cannot close without again respectfully commend-eye could reach flocks were peacefully ing a deep study of the entire history of Switzerland to republican statesmen and politicians. Too little attention has been paid to it in our country, and indeed, to the extent of our own knowledge, no able and true history of it has anywhere been written. The view we have taken, we are persuaded, will commend itself the most to men who are best acquainted with the subject; and if it tend to fix in any minds a deeper conviction that liberty is never lawlessness, and change never progress, nor always its necessary antecedent, we shall be contented with our task.

As respects Switzerland herself, we have the profoundest conviction that the days of her glory are not all passed. By refugees from the radical despotism that oppresses her we have heard of her desolation and her tears. But we have heard also of the heroic fortitude by which she despairs not of a regeneration. We have heard that now, as before the conflict, her people, whether gathered before their altars, or uniting around their humble hearths, pray with hearts greater than

feeding on the sides of the mountains, and rich orchards dropping with mellow fruit spread continuously through all the valley. And the traveller noticed that the mist had refreshed the valley, though the ravages of the year and the autumn spots were still visible.

Einsiedlen is given to the spoiler, and the peaceful cloisters that gave the traveller welcome are now the haunt of the robber and the debauchee. But these clouds of moral darkness cannot long rest upon Switzerland. They may leave mournful memories and ruined glories behind them, but at the same time the pulses of life that still remain will be quickened, and the assoilments of their political wayside, in other days, will be washed away.

NOTE. For such facts made use of in the above, as are of later date than the French Revolution, we political periodicals of the last thirty years. The can refer our readers only to the newspapers and facts of an earlier date are stated, we believe, less or more clearly in most of the professed histories of Switzerland. In the above sketch, however, we have not made use of these, except very incidentally, and therefore we cannot refer to them in par

ticular-it has been our fortune to have access to more living sources.

TWENTY SONNETS;

WITH A PREFACE AND NOTES.

THE PREFACE.

THE want of a sufficient number of sonnets, local in their imagery and national in their thought and melody, has long been a source of serious inconvenience to a large portion of our productive poetic population. Of pieces in this form in the writings of all our poets, the number has been seen to be comparatively small, and very few even of these have those marked characteristics which stamp them of genuine native growth-the pure legitimate offspring of Man in the Republic.

spect assumed that attitude of defiance
towards the rest of the world, which is
becoming in a country enjoying so many
advantages over every other.
Our poets
have not yet produced sonnets to which a
citizen of the United States in a foreign
land, might proudly turn when taunted
with the names of Plutarch and Laura.
In sculpture and painting, if we may be-
lieve our newspapers, our artists have in a
few years surpassed Pericles and Zeuxis,
and all their successors; but where is the
American SONNETTEER? Echo only re-
peats the indignant query.

To fill this aching void in our poetic literature, while it must be admitted to be a praiseworthy undertaking, by no means holds out for those who enter upon it the encouragement of sanguine hopes. The repeated failures in it remind new aspirants very forcibly of the fine exclamation:

"How hard it is to climb the steeple of Fame's proud temple!"

Various of our younger Bards have accordingly from time to time laudably essayed to supply this deficiency, but hitherto with a success by no means commensurate with the intrepid perseverance which has in many instances distinguished their endeavors. The aid of the Muse has been, and still is, frequently importuned through the columns of newspapers and the pages of magazines and yellow-covered duodecimos, with but little apparent effect, though in terms which would seem sufficiently powerful to draw tears of pity from a heart of stone, and propitiate therefore, in the writer of these ensuing It would be exceedingly presumptuous, or at least exasperate the inexorable daughters of Nox and Erebus.* The prosonnets, to hope that his labors have comportion of sonnets has, in consequence, in-pletely supplied the desideratum. Nevercreased very considerably, it is true; but in respect of quality the recently manufactured article has manifested no superiority over late importations, a circumstance particularly depressing, when it is remembered how lamentably, since the retirement of Wordsworth and Company, the English sonnet has deteriorated. Notwithstanding the increase in quantity, therefore, the conviction still painfully forces itself upon the intelligent observer, that the American continent has not yet in this important re

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.

theless, he has the vanity to flatter himself, feeble as his efforts may have been, that though he may have made but little improvement on the attempts of his predecessors and cotemporaries, he has, at all events, avoided some of their most serious Some of our writers appear to have read the errors. He has at least been intelligible. old close-packed sonnets of the great poets, imitated them from that point of observawithout understanding them, and to have tion; thereby, consequently, rendering their productions incomprehensible to readers not in the same opacous condition with themselves. Others have depicted them

selves in lukewarm states of feeling, which it requires a severe effort of charity on the part of intelligent readers to believe unaffected.

Both these faults the present writer hopes he has avoided. That he has fallen into no others, however, he would be far from being understood as asserting. In spite of his efforts to the contrary, he is greatly apprehensive lest many of his

things shall be found deficient in point of gravity. But the intense seriousness of others may, possibly, counterbalance this defect and restore the whole to an agreeable equilibrium.

With these remarks, he ventures to submit his works to the judgment of a discerning public, deprecating deliberate depreciation, but courting candid criticism.

THE SONNETS.

"Souning in moral vertue was his speche

And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."-CHAUCER.

"To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air:

He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise."-MILTON.

"Poetry, especially heroical, seems to be raised altogether from a noble foundation, which makes much for the dignity of man's nature."-BACON,

"Begin, murderer;-leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come;

I.

As timid boys that walk through woods at night,

A lonesome road, when all is dark and still, Except the humming sound of distant mill, Grow deadly wide awake and quick of sight, And faint with dread of meeting ghostly sprite, To keep their spirits up and other spirits off, Do whistle, aye, not stopping save to cough,

Strange tunes unnatural, with all their might; E'en so doth he, that boy of larger size,

The locomotive, who with lungs of iron, And breathing vapor hot, the rail goes by

on

He fills the darkened air with hideous cries,
As through the far-off hills, for many a league,
He speeds away and never feels fatigue.

The writer's idea in this sonnet has been, it will be perceived, to bring forward and develop a single feature in the imagery of our age and country-the locomotive. Remembering that the triumphs of the steam engine had called forth the eloquence of a Jeffery, he saw no reason why this most picturesque form of that wonderworking, though still infantile Power, should not be deemed a topic suited to the requirements of verse. The number of railroads in the United States also, the vast

"-HAMLET.

length of many of them, and the amount of productive capital invested in this species of property, all conspire to render the subject one in which large numbers of intelligent readers may be supposed to have a personal interest; though the poet himself must confess he has only looked upon it in the light of an occasional passenger. to the subject of the following:Precisely similar are the facts in relation

II.

My love she has blue eyes and auburn hair,

And like the light of Heaven are her eyes, The clear, calm radiance of unclouded skies; And her rich ringlets blowing everywhere Round her white neck, when oft with footfall light

She hurriedly o'ertrips the windy mall, They seem like banners at a festivalLike golden banners fluttering in the sight Of setting sunbeams. For they kindle still

Within my heart the fire of old romance, As banners did my boyish soul entrance With dreams heroic. Blow, sweet curls! ye fill

With frolic youth the winds that with ye play, And make them seem to keep love's holiday.

All the occurrences of daily life are sus

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