control, might not be only evidences of the same
vast agencies at work, whose counterparts, in depths below the human eye,
shake and rend the soil? Those were the days of speculation, and I
indulged in them like the rest of the world. Every man stood, as the
islander of the South Sea may stand on his shore, contemplating the
conflict of fire and water, while the furnaces of the centre are forcing
up the island in clouds of vapour and gusts of whirlwind. All was strange,
undefined, and startling. One thing alone seemed certain; that the past
_regime_ was gone, never to return; that a great barrier had suddenly been
dropped between the two sovereignties; that the living generation stood on
the dividing pinnacle between the languid vices of the past system and the
daring, perhaps guilty, energies of the system to come. Behind man lay the
long level of wasted national faculties, emasculating superstitions, the
graceful feebleness of a sensual nobility, and the superb follies of a
haughty and yet helpless throne. Before him rose a realm of boundless
extent, but requiring frames of vigour, and feelings undismayed by
difficulty, to traverse and subdue;--a horizon of hills and clouds, where
the gale blew fresh and the tempest rolled; where novel difficulties must
be met at every step, but still where, if we trod at all, we must ascend
at every step, where every clearing of the horizon must give us a new and
more comprehensive prospect, and where every struggle with the rudeness of
the soil, or the roughness of the elements, must enhance the vigour of the
nerve that encountered them.

Those were dreams; yet I had not then made due allowance for the nature of
the foreign mind. I was yet to learn its absence of all sober thought; its
ready temptation by every trivially of the hour; its demand of extravagant
excitement to rouse it into action, and its utter apathy where its
passions were not bribed. I had imagined a national sovereignty,
righteous, calm, and resolute, trained by the precepts of a Milton and a
Locke; I found only an Italian despotism, trained by the romance of
Rousseau and the scepticism of Voltaire.

Every day in the capital now had its celebration, and all exhibited the
taste and talent of the First Consul; but one characteristic fete at
length woke me to the true design of this extraordinary man--the
inauguration of the Legion of Honour. It was the first step to the throne,
and a step of incompatible daring and d