guage which found for his ideas words that came as from
a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own
heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all
around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the
Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his
youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and
Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly
gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of
his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.
If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the
victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with
which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure
of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men
felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up
inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new
world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.

The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive
transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual
declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the
warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word
travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or
solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first
disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years of war and
convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth
century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those
fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the
aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor
Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the
world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the
armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings,
nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers
like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Koerner, warriors like Kutusov,
Bluecher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments
of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities
and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in
this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and
one sole man--the world-d