for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his
vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145,
in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry
seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave
about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of
the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the
intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which
_can_ be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized
in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now
pass on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every
other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first
object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny
that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system
seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion
and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to
throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of
weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged
that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would
promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider,
rather than from the narrower point of view."

"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a
cause, and believed in it--the cause of united Italy; and so long as he
was free to express sympathy with this--so long, his critics say, as he
was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his
way--he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to
act--with the firm ground wheron to act--came also the responsibilities
of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the
wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths
which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real,
the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance
remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which
brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."

"He broke faith with his people too"--so his critics continue--"for he
supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of
speech and writing which wo