o
emphasize sufficiently the great influence upon the morality of the
entire nation of an empress so womanly and pure in her simple greatness,
just as we cannot estimate the influence for evil by bad examples on the
throne on every woman in the land during the eras of the Catherines of
Russia, the Pompadours and the Dubarrys in France, the Lichtenaus in
Prussia.

In contrast to the happiness of the present Empress of Germany stands
the fate of the late martyred Empress of Austria (1837-1898). A daughter
of Duke Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, she became the consort of the
present Emperor of Austria under the happiest auspices. Exceedingly
beautiful and intelligent, a Greek scholar of a high order, a lover of
nature and of all that is beautiful, fond of horseback riding and of
every sport tending to produce that symmetry of intellectual and
physical beauty called by the Greeks _kalokagathia_; the happy mother of
daughters and of one son, the ill-fated crown prince, Rudolf, she
adorned the Habsburg throne with beauty and brilliancy instead of the
ancient formal etiquette and Spanish grandest. But sorrow came to her in
its most terrible form: the tragic and mysterious death, while on a
hunting expedition, of her son Rudolf and Countess Vetsera, whom he
loved, though he was married to Stephanie of Belgium, broke her heart.
Her entire life changed, she hid herself in her Greek palace on the
Island of Corfu, or travelled restlessly through Europe. On a visit to
Geneva, while walking from her hotel to the ship, she was assassinated
by a miscreant Luccheni, an Italian anarchist (September 10, 1898). One
of the vilest deeds in the history of criminology ended the brilliant
life of the greatest woman martyr on a throne since the Austrian
archduchess Marie Antoinette who shed her royal blood on the guillotine,
as Queen of France in 1793, for the crimes of preceding royal
generations.

Among the German women authors of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century who are really gifted with great poetic talent we meet with a
poetess, a German princess on a foreign throne: Princess Elizabeth of
Wied, Queen of Rumania, famous under the name of Carmen Sylva. She
belongs to a family which for many generations has produced remarkable
men. Her great-grandmother, Louise von Wied, was a poetess of
considerable talent; other members of her family had excelled as
naturalists, poets, and painters; three of her granduncles fell during
the Napole