again;--yet unanswered. The
unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at
twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea-sand;--white, a strange
Aphrodite,--out of the sea-foam; stretching its grey, cloven wings
among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood. This
has to be looked upon, and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator
or Duerer saw it.[133] The wreck of one guilty country does not infer the
ruin of all countries, and need not cause general terror respecting the
laws of the universe. Neither did the orderly and narrow succession of
domestic joy and sorrow in a small German community bring the question
in its breadth, or in any unresolvable shape, before the mind of Duerer.
But the English death--the European death of the nineteenth
century--was of another range and power; more terrible a thousandfold
in its merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, incalculably, in
its mystery and shame. What were the robber's casual pang, or the range
of the flying skirmish, compared to the work of the axe, and the sword,
and the famine, which was done during this man's youth on all the hills
and plains of the Christian earth, from Moscow to Gibraltar? He was
eighteen years old when Napoleon came down on Arcola. Look on the map
of Europe and count the blood-stains on it, between Arcola and
Waterloo.[134]

Not alone those blood-stains on the Alpine snow, and the blue of the
Lombard plain. The English death was before his eyes also. No decent,
calculable, consoled dying; no passing to rest like that of the aged
burghers of Nuremberg town. No gentle processions to churchyards among
the fields, the bronze crests bossed deep on the memorial tablets, and
the skylark singing above them from among the corn. But the life
trampled out in the slime of the street, crushed to dust amidst the
roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howling winter wind
along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all,
rotted down to forgotten graves through years of ignorant patience, and
vain seeking for help from man, for hope in God--infirm, imperfect
yearning, as of motherless infants starving at the dawn; oppressed
royalties of captive thought, vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair.

A goodly landscape this, for the lad to paint, and under a goodly
light. Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator's lurid
chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duerer's spotted rest of sunny gleam o