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Prague in Modern Times

into one of his plays. When Mr. Kohl visited Prague in 1841 the song, which he curiously enough believed to be of ancient origin, was already sung everywhere in the city. He translated some lines of the song, and though his translation by no means does justice to the beauty of the original, I will transcribe it here, as giving the traveller some idea of the contents of a song to which he will hear constant allusions—

Where is my house? where is my home?
Streams among the meadows creeping,
Brooks from rock to rock are leaping,
Everywhere bloom spring and flowers
Within this paradise of ours;
There, ’tis there, the beauteous land!
Bohemia, my fatherland!
Where is my house? where is my home?
Knowst thou the country loved of God,
Where noble souls in well-shaped forms reside,
Where the free glance crushes the foeman’s pride?
There wilt thou find of Cechs, the honoured race,
Among the Cechs be aye my dwelling-place.’

The patriots themselves do not at first appear to have felt certain of the victory of the cause. Thus we are told that when Jungmann received the visit of two other patriots in his modest lodgings in the street which now bears his name, he said, in a fit of depression, ‘It needs only that the ceiling of this room should fall in, and there would be an end of Bohemian literature.’ He was, of course, alluding to the small number of the ‘patriots.’

In 1848 disturbances broke out at Prague. A Slavic Congress, comprising representatives of all branches of that race, met there under the presidency of Palacky, the great Bohemian statesman and historian, whose name has already been mentioned. Its deliberations were soon interrupted by the turbu-

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