ou, learn the needs of a true democracy. You
may in time learn to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy
of a nation, the only really nobles,--the LABORING CLASSES.

And Metternich, too, is crushed; the seed of the woman has had his
foot on the serpent. I have seen the Austrian arms dragged through
the streets of Rome and burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The Italians
embraced one another, and cried, _Miracolo! Providenza!_ the modern
Tribune Ciceronacchio fed the flame with faggots; Adam Mickiewicz, the
great poet of Poland, long exiled from his country or the hopes of a
country, looked on, while Polish women, exiled too, or who perhaps,
like one nun who is here, had been daily scourged by the orders of a
tyrant, brought little pieces that had been scattered in the street
and threw them into the flames,--an offering received by the Italians
with loud plaudits. It was a transport of the people, who found no way
to vent their joy, but the symbol, the poesy, natural to the Italian
mind. The ever-too-wise "upper classes" regret it, and the Germans
choose to resent it as an insult to Germany; but it was nothing of
the kind; the insult was to the prisons of Spielberg, to those who
commanded the massacres of Milan,--a base tyranny little congenial to
the native German heart, as the true Germans of Germany are at this
moment showing by their resolves, by their struggles.

When the double-headed eagle was pulled down from above the lofty
portal of the Palazzo di Venezia, the people placed there in its stead
one of white and gold, inscribed with the name ALTA ITALIA, and quick
upon the emblem followed the news that Milan was fighting against her
tyrants,--that Venice had driven them out and freed from their prisons
the courageous Protestants in favor of truth, Tommaso and Manin,--that
Manin, descendant of the last Doge, had raised the republican banner
on the Place St. Mark,--and that Modena, that Parma, were driving out
the unfeeling and imbecile creatures who had mocked Heaven and man by
the pretence of government there.

With indescribable rapture these tidings were received in Rome. Men
were seen dancing, women weeping with joy along the street. The youth
rushed to enroll themselves in regiments to go to the frontier. In the
Colosseum their names were received. Father Gavazzi, a truly patriotic
monk, gave them the cross to carry on a new, a better, because
defensive, crusade. Sterbini, long exiled, addressed them.