upon the faces of the men who are lifted above the crowd, finds
that its ideas reach beyond the crisis in its life into a century of
power and beauty, during which its emancipated tendency springs forward,
with graceful gestures, to seize every spiritual advantage. Its
movements were grand and impressive while it struggled for the
opportunity to make known the divine intent that inspired it; but when
the fetters burst, and every limb enjoys the victory and the release,
the movements become unbounded, yet rhythmical, like Nature's, and
smite, or flow, or penetrate, like hers. To such a people war comes
as the disturbance of the earth's crust which helps it to a habitable
surface and lifts fair slopes to ripen wine and grain.

[Footnote B: Some cultivated Bohemians who can recall the glories of
Ziska and his chiefs, and who comprehend the value of the tendency which
they strove to represent, think that there would have grown a Bohemian
people, a great centre of Protestant and Slavonic influence, if it
had not been for the Battle of Weissenberg in 1620, when the Catholic
Imperialists defeated their King Frederic. A verse of a popular song,
_The Patriot's Lament_, runs thus, in Wratislaw's translation:--

"Cursed mountain, mountain white!
Upon thee was crushed our might;
What in thee lies covered o'er
Ages cannot back restore."

If there had been a Bohemian people, preserving a real vital tendency,
the Battle of the White Mountain would have resulted differently, even
had it been a defeat.

Other patriots, cultivated enough to be Panslavists, indulge a more
cheerful vein. They see a good time coming, and raise the cry of _Hej
Slovane_!

"Hey, Slavonians! our Slavonic language still is living,
Long as our true loyal heart is for our nation striving;
Lives, lives the Slavonic spirit, and 't will live forever:
Hell and thunder! vain against us all your rage shall shiver."

This is nothing but a frontier feeling. The true Slavonic centre is
at St. Petersburg; thence will roll a people and a language over all
kindred ground.]

After all, then, we must carefully discover what a war was about, before
we can trace it, either for good or for evil, into the subsequent life
of a nation. There can be no such thing as exhaustion or deterioration,
if the eternal laws have won the laurel of a fight; for they are
fountains of youth, from which new blood comes rushing through the
depleted veins. And it soon mantles