FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE.

THE MEETING ON THE RHINE: GERMAN MOVEMENTS AND PROSPECTS.

Frankfort, September 15.

Ils sont passés ces jours de fête ! The Rhine, lately overrun with crowned heads of steamers and monarchs, and trembling with the continual fire of most peaceful cannon, is returned to its ordinary and quiet course. The first stone of the new cathedral has been laid by the royal hand of Frederick William, called the German; the military reviews and parades-en-gala are happily past, and every-day life resumes its busy and noisy track. Our German nation is very original and strange in things of this kind. Others are celebrating holidays and festivals when a national task has been done; we do so when it is begun, without knowing when or whether it will be finished. The official joy of the German newspapers, praises with a sorry vein of humour the national character and importance of this fête, which is the first, they say, where German princes and German nations (you see we are yet in the happy plural) have met in a true and large fraternity, for a great and universal purpose. They who like to cast a look behind the curtain, assure us that King Frederick William did not come to Cologne only to give three blows with a silver hammer to a great stone, or to shout here and there a happy toast. The King of Hanover, the Dukes of Nassau, the Archduke John of Austria, Prince Metternich, a numberless and nameless set of German princes, dukes, and counts,did all these really come together with the pious design of hearing a mass in a cathedral? I dare say they did not. Every party, every opinion, substitutes and supplies its own sympathies and wishes to this occasion and its vast assemblage. The liberals dream of a general German amnesty, projected between Austria, Prussia, Hanover, and Bavaria. The aristocracy, particularly the gentry from the shores of "the free and German Rhine," look to these days of Cologne as a beginning of a new feudal and chivalrous time. The constitutional party stirs again with its old and always new desire: its "denique censeo:" Prussia must have a constitution. So they say, and the king smiles and shakes his head and shoulders, nodding his refrain: Not yet my children, the time is not yet come.

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The inhabitants of Cologne, a clever and industrious sort of people, made the best of all these demonstrations, acclamations, and declamations. They took, and with full hands I can assure you, money from their guests; not considering whether they were kings or beggars, countrymen or foreigners, aristocrats or republicans. Two Englishmen, innocent strangers, who had dropped into this bustle and noise without the least inspiration, paid to the general enthusiasm forty francs per night for one room and two beds. Observe, too, that they,

ody bus not being able to find an hotel to remain in, found this most generous and disinterested hospitality in the house of an honest patrician, Highstreet, No. 40. It must be confessed, at any rate, that Cologne is not the town for a great and national solemnity. Nowhere in Germany is the feeling of exclusive and isolated selfism driven to so disagreeable a point as in that place. Cologne does not know any thing higher and more solemn than its gurzenich, its town-hall; and no fête grander than its carnival. So here they had dressed up the old and venerable ruin of their cathedral like a schoolboy in holidays; like the bouf-gras of Mardi-gras at Paris. Flowers, ribbons, standards! the mean-looking procession, the wearisome illumination! that was all. And such a thing they call the first national fete and the commencement of a new German 2291) mort tools to dona i

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Foreign Correspondence

If there is a political and national FUTURE for Germany-and who would deny or doubt it? its conditions lie not in a Prussian Prussian constituconstitu tion merely, or a customs-union; nor in the liberty of the press, the first fruits of which are now permitted to this paper and now to that; nor in the settlement of the dynastic dilemma in Hanover; nor in the union of all the disjecta membra" in one body, covered with the uniform of a Prussian general or minister. No, t there is another Co-operation needed to so large and grand a result. Germany is nothing, and will never be any thing in Europe; neither a nation by itself, independent from Russia, or from England, and safe against France; nor indeed a political and material unity of any kind; as long as Austria does not give up the isolation, the hermetic separation, in which she has kept aloof from German progress. Austria and Prussia, not Austria or Prussia; that is the question. They separated from, and lost each other at Ratisbon; let them meet again at Frankfort.