Carbonari
rebellion, Leopardi, as Mr. Trevelyan tells us, wrote to his sister on
her marriage: "The children you will have must be either cowards or
unhappy; choose the unhappy." The hope of freedom appeared extinct.
Tyrants, as Byron wrote, could be conquered but by tyrants, and freedom
found no champion. The Italians themselves were merged in the slime of
despairing satisfaction, and he watched them creeping, "crouching, and
crab-like," along their streets. But through that dark gate of
unhappiness which Leopardi named as the one choice for all but cowards,
led the thin path that freedom must always take. Great as were Mazzini's
services to all Europe, his greatest service to his countrymen lay in
arousing them from the slough of contentment to a life of hardship,
sacrifice, and unhappiness. When, after the loss of Rome in 1849,
Garibaldi called for volunteers to accompany his hazardous retreat, he
said to them: "I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I
offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death." Swinburne
himself may have had those words in mind when, writing also of
Garibaldi, he said of freedom:

"She, without shelter or station,
She, beyond limit or bar,
Urges to slumberless speed
Armies that famish, that bleed,
Sowing their lives for her seed,
That their dust may rebuild her a nation,
That their souls may relight her a star."

"Happy are all they that follow her," he continued, and in a sense we
may well deem their fate happiness. But it is in the sense of what
Carlyle in a memorable passage called the allurements to action. "It is
a calumny on men," he wrote, "to say they are roused to heroic action by
ease, hope of pleasure, reward in this world or the next. Difficulty,
abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart
of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements
the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so
unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must
invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in
such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it
was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner of
freedom streams.

IV

DEEDS NOT WORDS

As he wrote--as he wrote his best, while the shafts of the spirit
lightened in his brain--Heine would sometimes feel a mysterious figure
standing behind him, mu