redient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and,
however huge it may _look_, is in itself small. Napoleon's working,
accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of
gunpowder wide spread; a blazing up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole
universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes
out. The universe, with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and
kind soil beneath, is still there.

The Duke of Weimar told his friends always to be of courage; this
Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true
doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it
tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one
day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound interest. I am not sure
but he had better 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 amount in the long run 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 every where, he left in a most
inarticulate state. He was a great _ebauche_, rude-draught; as indeed what
great man is not? 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 Oberon to France.' So it was _by
nature_, by Napoleon-nature; and yet look how in fact--HERE AM I! He
cannot understand 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, h