round all the edifices of existence; they must all
be molten into it, and anew bodied forth from it,
or stand unconsumed among its fiery surges. Woe to
him whose edifice is not built of true asbest, and
on the everlasting rock, but on the false sand and
the drift-wood of accident, and the paper and
parchment of antiquated habit! For the power or
powers exist not on our earth that can say to that
sea--roll back, or bid its proud waves be still.

"What form so omnipotent an element will
assume--how long it will welter to and fro as a
wild democracy, a wilder anarchy--what
constitution and organization it will fashion for
itself, and for what depends on it in the depths
of time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture,
wherein brightest hope is not unmingled with
fearful apprehensions and awe at the boundless
unknown. The more cheering is this one thing,
which we do see and know--that its tendency is to
a universal European commonweal; that the wisest
in all nations will communicate and co-operate;
whereby Europe will again have its true Sacred
College and council of Amphictyons; wars will
become rarer, less inhuman; and in the course of
centuries, such delirious ferocity in nations, as
in individuals it already is, may be proscribed
and become obsolete for ever."

My last and not least conclusive extract (for it shows the actual hold
which these speculations have taken of the minds of practical men--of
men out in the world, and even of _soldiers_) is from a book popular
among all classes of readers--the _Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau_,
written by Major Sir Francis Head. What he says of one country's
educating another, by the natural progress of books and opinion, and of
the effect which this is likely to have upon governments even as remote
and unwilling as Russia, is particularly worthy of attention.

The author is speaking of some bathers at whom he had been looking, and
of a Russian Prince, who lets us into some curious information
respecting the leading-strings in which grown gentlemen are kept by
despotism:--

"For more than half an hour I had been indolently
watching this amphibious scene, when the landlord
enterin