r lost.

The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance. Heine's
letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three
Days awakened. "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Marseillaise_!" he
writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"
reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize
again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will crown my head for the
fight of death. Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,
words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and
illumine the cabins of the poor." But when Lafayette presented to
France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton
umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when
Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the
struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.
France herself was weary of the illusion. "We had need of a sword," a
Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears." The taunt was as
foolish as it was unjust. France assuredly had done her part in the
war for Liberty. The hour had come for the States of Europe to work
out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,
a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,
and Metternich.

Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more
limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of
the world. Other despots died--Alexander I in 1825, the two
Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and
Frederick William III in 1840. Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,
Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on--"the gods," as
Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."
The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric
he had reared. From Guizot and his master he found but little
resistance. The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian
system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little
resistance as the France of Guizot. Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion
of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of
his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of
Europe than the march of an army.

II

NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM