scribed to the land owner, incapable of
understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of
parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and
formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William,
in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis
of '48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools
which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out
on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the
feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political
and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very
perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the
privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an
incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of
life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which
discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and
electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and
thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all
histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive
society. The world cannot understand that he should have been
perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of
Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation,
revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant
star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by
him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire;
and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like
violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new
German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where
its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his
shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of
the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost
at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and
ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles,
foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the
innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which
it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had
witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the
tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I
am rendered in