THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
one adjoining mine. A few minutes later I turned and could hardly believe my eyes when, with a violent heart jump, I suddenly became aware that only the low partition between the boxes separated me from Betty. Soon the ladies began to look around for something and I heard them say that they had left their opera-glasses at home. Here was an evident opportunity for me. I held my own opera-glass in my hand. What more natural than to offer it to Betty with a polite word? Indeed, was it not positively impolite not to do so? But—but—the necessary words would not come. I sat completely paralyzed and tongue-tied throughout the whole play. Finally the ladies left the box and with them my long hoped-for opportunity. I rushed from the theater, tormenting myself with self-reproach, and instead of going, as I had intended, to the Franconia, I took a long, lonely walk in the night. But soon this love-dream became more shadowy than ever, for events occurred which tore me altogether out of my surroundings.
Of the larger parliamentary bodies that had issued from the revolution of March, only the national parliament in Frankfurt was still in existence. That existence it had owed to the longing of the German people, or rather the German peoples, for national unity, and it was its natural and universally understood mission to weld the German peoples under a common constitution of national government into one great nation. Immediately after the revolution of March, 1848, the different German governments, and with them also Austria, because of her German possessions, had recognized this object as a legitimate one, and it was with their co-operation that in May the elections for the national parliament had taken place. The large majority of that body, in fact, the German people in general, regarded the Frankfurt parliament as the specific representative of the sovereignty of the German nation. It
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