ry, but let France be free!"

How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these
men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,
witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other
two for which saint and reformer died! And their battle-march, which
is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,
the vision of the future of the world, which closes _Hellas_.

This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith
that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in
political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.
Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young,
for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille
Charles James Fox sees it arise. "By how much," he writes to a friend,
"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!" Its
presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed. Wordsworth,
Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!
The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human
heart! First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!

This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath
to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its
poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It is the
faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart
Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the
Girondins. For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the
federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the
Second Age pass. Not in political any more than in religious freedom
could man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and the new earth
which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw
beyond the sunset.

And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of
space and search the depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science,
and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if
the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of
every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure
analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the
annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle
brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave