itself with frightful compound-interest. I am
not sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, or
had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German
Bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous injustice,
which no man, let him paint an inch thick, could make-out to be other.
It burnt deep into the hearts of men, it and the like of it;
suppressed fire flashed in the eyes of men, as they thought of
it,--waiting their day! Which day _came_: Germany rose round
him.--What Napoleon _did_ will in the long-run amount to what he did
_justly_; what Nature with her laws will sanction. To what of reality
was in him; to that and nothing more. The rest was all smoke and
waste. _La carriere ouverte aux talens_: that great true Message,
which has yet to articulate and fulfil itself everywhere, he left in a
most inarticulate state. He was a great _ebauche_, a rude-draught
never completed; as indeed what great man is other? Left in _too_ rude
a state, alas!

His notions of the world, as he expresses them there at St. Helena,
are almost tragical to consider. He seems to feel the most unaffected
surprise that it has all gone so; that he is flung-out on the rock
here, and the World is still moving on its axis. France is great, and
all-great; and at bottom, he is France. England itself, he says, is by
Nature only an appendage of France; "another Isle of Oleron to
France." So it was _by Nature_, by Napoleon-Nature; and yet look how
in fact,--HERE AM I! He cannot understand it: inconceivable
that the reality has not corresponded to his program of it; that
France was not all-great, that he was not France. 'Strong delusion,'
that he should believe the thing to be which _is_ not! The compact,
clear-seeing, decisive Italian nature of him, strong, genuine, which
he once had, has enveloped itself, half-dissolved itself, in a turbid
atmosphere of French fanfaronade. The world was not disposed to be
trodden-down underfoot; to be bound into masses, and built together,
as _he_ liked, for a pedestal to France and him: the world had quite
other purposes in view! Napoleon's astonishment is extreme. But alas,
what help now? He had gone that way of his; and Nature also had gone
her way. Having once parted with Reality, he tumbles helpless in
Vacuity; no rescue for him. He had to sink there, mournfully as man
seldom did; and break his great heart, and die,--this poor Napoleon: a
great implement too soon wasted, t