The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-07 00:00:00

The Last Hours of Prince Albert.

There has reached us from abroad a most inter-
esting extract from a letter which was written by a
member of the Queen's household shortly after the
death of Prince Albert. The extremely confidential
position which the writer held at the time not only
gives the assurance of perfect reliability, but invests
the following lines with a very special interest.
After describing the :grief and fears of the whole
household for the Queen, th© writer speaks of the
personal loss sustained in the death of Prince Albert:
"How I shall miss his conversation about the ehil.
dren. He used often to come into the schoolroom
to speak about the education of the children, and he
never left me without my feeling that he had
strengthened my hands and raised the standard I
was aiming at. Nothing mean or frivolous could
exist in the atmosphere that surrounded him ; the
conversation could not be trifling if he was in the
room. I dread the return of spring for my dear
lady. It was his favourite time of the year—the
opening leaves, the early flowers, and fresh green
were such a delight to him; and he so loved to"point
out their beauties to his children that it will be ter-
rible to see them without him. The children kept
his table supplied with primroses, which he espe-
cially loved. The last Sunday he passed on earth
was a very blessed one for the Princess Alice to
!ook back upon. He was very ill and very weak,
and she spent the afternoon alone with him,
while the others were in church. He begged to
have his sofa drawn to the window, that he might
see the sky and the cloads sailing past. He then
asked her to play to him, and she went through
several of his favorite hymns and chorale. After
she had played some time she looked round and
saw him lying back, his hands folded as if in prayer,
and his eyes shut. lie lay so long without moving
that she thought he had fallen asleep. Presently
he looked up and smiled. She said, ' Were you
asleep, dear papa ?"Oh no,' he answered, only
I have such sweet thoughts.' During his illness
his hands were often folded in prayer ; and when
ho did not speak, his serene face showed that the
happy thoughts were with him to the end. The
Princess Alice's fortitude has amazed us all. She
fith7r from the first that both her father and mother's
firmnos depended on her firmness, and she set her-
self to the duty. He loved to speak openly of his
condition. .and had many wishes to express. Ho
loved to hear i...ymns and prayers. He could not
speak to the Que,ln of himself, for she could not
bear to listen, and shut her eyes to the danger. His
daughter slaw that she must act differently, and she
never let her voice falter or shed a single tear in his
presence. She sat by him, listened to all he said,
repeated hymns, and then, when she could bear it
no longer, would walk calmly to the door, and then
rush away to her room, roturnit;g soon with the
same calm and pale face without any,appearance of
the agitation she had gone through. I have had
several interviews with the poor Queen since. The
first time she said, 'You can feel for me, for you
have gone through this trial.' Another time she
said how strange it seemed, when silo looked back,
to see how much for the last six months: the Prince's
mind had dwelt upon death and the fuWre state ;
their conversation had so often turned upo,l these
subjects and they had read together a book Palled
" Heaven our Home,"which had interested him v." 17
much. He once said to her, ' We don't know in wha:
state we shall meet again; bat that we shall recog-
nize each other and be together in eternity I am
perfeotly certain.' It seemed as if it had been in-
tended to prepare her mind and comfort her, though
of course it did not strike her then. She said she
was a wonder i 9 herself, and she was sure it was in
answer to the prayers of her people that she was so
sustained. She feared it would not last, and that
times of agony wore befok.,e her. She said, There's
l that I felt when I lost
not the bitterness in this trig_
en ;but now 1 can
•
my mother—l was so rebellious :h
see the mercy and love that are mlzed in my trial.'
Her whole thought now is to walk worthy of
i
and her greatest comfort to think that la:s sprit I
always near her, and knows all that she is
—Northern Whig. doing.

ACCIDENT ON THE MIDLAND RAILWAY.—OR
Lronday afternoon a young man named Frederick
winiali:!4, a cooper, 26 years of age, was in the act of cross-
ing the kiaLlaci Railway, near one of the engine sheds, for
the purpose of res cling the Horfield Gardens, when an
engine suddenly emerges d from the shed. The alarm was
given by the driver; too Lto, however, for the man to
escape, and ha was knocked dows"...
. the wheels of the engine
going over his legs and severing then.: from his body. He
was immediately conveyed to the infirm:lqt and is now
going on favourably.— Weafern ,Daily Tress:
FATAL DUEL.—A Geneva letter in the ,Temps
says The Socialist agitator M. Lassalle has just los,
his
life in a duel with a Moldo-Wallachian. He was only
40
years of age. The adversaries fought with pistols at 15 paces,
and were to fire while the signal, one, two, three, was being
pronounced. Lassalle was an excellent marksman, but the
Moldo-Wallachian fired at the word one,' and his ball
traversed the intestines of tho other. The Countess do
Hatzfeld, who happened to be at Geneva at the time, imme-
diately sent for several experienced surgeons, and,
amongst
others, for M. Chelius, jun., of Heidelberg; but on their
arrival the sufferer was already on the point of death. The
duel did not originate in political motives."
THE STORM AT LIYERFOOL AND IN THE CHAN.
NXL.—During the whole of Sunday night, Monday, and up
to an early hour yesterday, a very severe storm of wind and
rain swept over Liverpool, and from accounts which aro
constantly coming to hand, it must have extended tar
away clown the Irish Channel. Several Welsh and Irish
coasters have been very roughly handled, and one or two
large foreign-going vessels have been compelled to put
back to the Mersey for shelter. Fortunately, up to the
despatch of our parcel yesterday evening, no serious
disaster had been reported at Liverpool. The splendid
new screw steamer City of Dublin, belonging to Messrs
Liverpool, New York, and Philadelphia Steam.
ship Company, which left Liverpool on Saturday for New
York, has been obliged to return to the Mersey in a
crippled condition. The City of Dublin encountered the
full force of the gale on Sunday, and the tremendous seas
caused the ship to pitch very much, so that at times her
screw would be completely out of the water. On ono of the
occasions, in the absence of any resisting power, the main
driving wheel went nun,' at such a rate as to beck all
the cogs out of the wheel.

If you are desirous to study the symptoms of
political movement in Germany, mind you do not
come to look for them in the German cities—not,
at least, in these dead months of August and Sep--
tember. The very landlord of your hotel is out of
town, and the representative of your Gracious
Queen is not only off to the Hartz mountains him-
self, but be has actually shut up shop, and left no•
body but a "small servant," a little, slovenly
wench, to watch the dust as it gathers on the shelves
of his desolate consular office. There was a meet-
ing of all the German agriculturists the other day
in Hanover; a convention of all the German
jurists yesterday at Brunswick. The papers
throughout the land are full of their long-winded
deliberations; yet there was scarcely a soul astir
about the streets of either city, and we were not
aware of any even temporary ignition of the waters
of the Leine or the Ocker, as they flowed peaceably
and somewhat murkily past their walls. It must,
one would think, go rather hard with a traveller,
who should find neither owls at Athens nor
earthen pots at Samos, nor coals at Newcastle.
But what would you say of a poor wight who
had been baffled in his endeavours to fall in
with a bookseller in Leipsic I' Yet such was the
case with me. All the gentlemen in that line of
business are to rendezbous here for the great
Michaelmas Fair, and, in the meanwhile, they leave
their comptoirs to take care of themselves. Of the
clerks that are left behind one was blind, another a
stutterer, a third hopelessly stupid—so I went no
further with my inquiries. Of course, when
everybody is out of town, the town still swarms
with nobodies. At Hanover, which looked like
Palmyr a the opera season opened on the 28th
ult.; here, in Leipsic, on the Ist instant. The
houses in both places were crammed, though the
spectacle was something worse than third-rate.
Some of the amateurs who called out "Herman
Cortes !" nine times at the Court Theatre the other
diy were certainly human beings, but they are not
the people you want—not the political men. For
these there is, at this bathing season, a general
holyday. Were even all the politicians at their
homes instead of at their Kursaals, one might doubt
whether there can at any time be such a thing as
political life in Germany. Even newspapers,
though possibly as numerous is this country nanny-
where else in the world, seem not to be for the Ger-
mans the daily bread they are for other civilised
people. Printed and published they are, no doubt,
and, it may be surmised, read and inwardly di-
gested, but they are not as übiquitous as in France
or Italy, where newsmen are to be heard bawling
underneath every window; nor es iu the United
States of America, where a news shop is esta-
blished at every third door of every street,
or at the door of every bar-room of every hotel ;
nor, finally, as in England, where every railway
station is infested with news-dealers, both peripa-
tetic and stationary. Even in Hamburg, the
busiest and most advanced centre of German corn•
mercial life, the Nacrichten or the Borsenhalle can
only be had on subscription, or, at the utmost, by
way of favour, on application to the respective
offices. I suppose the Germans take in such
for home consumption ; the reading-rooms of the
best hotels profess to keep the papers for the
benefit of their customers, and a stray copy, now
one, now of !mother, of these periodical publica.
tions is to be found strewn here and there
about the table, but as a general rule, only the stale
copy, beer-stained, redolent of tobacco, torn to
tatters, and hanging, not without difficulty, on the
steel or wicker frame, which makes the reading or
even the holding of it, a most troublesome task.
Out of doors, it is neither the street porter nor the
dienstmann nor the drowsky driver that is ever to
be seen, as in other countries, with a newspaper in
his hand. You hardly ever fall in with a fellow►
traveller in a railway carriage, be it of the first,
second, or third class, that happens to be so em-
ployed. Wore it ever the case, twenty to one your
reading vie-a,via would, like yourself, be a stranger
in the land. Whatever the cause may be, although
every German can read, although writing and print-
ing men aro to be found in this country in greater
numbers than anywhere else in Europe, reading
seems to be a solemn ceremony, only to be per-
formed within closed walls, in the sanctuary of
home,

SE(Joivr. EDITION.

fi,UN OFF!' CE, HALF-PAST 4 O'CLOCK.

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