ter he had read these lines of a legend, the young man made me
admire them, and looked at me.

He whom I thus see again, as precisely as one sees a portrait, just as
he was that evening so wonderfully far away, was my father. And I
remember how devoutly I believed--from that day now buried among them
all--in the beauty of those things, because my father had told me they
were beautiful.

In the low room of the old house, under the green and watery gleam of
the diamond panes in the lancet window, the ancient citizen cries,
"There are people mad enough to believe that a day will come when
Brittany will no longer be at war with Maine!" He appears in the
vortex of the past, and so saying, sinks back in it. And an engraving,
once and for a long time heeded, again takes life: Standing on the
wooden boom of the ancient port, his scarred doublet rusted by wind and
brine, his old back bellied like a sail, the pirate is shaking his fist
at the frigate that passes in the distance; and leaning over the tangle
of tarred beams, as he used to on the nettings of his corsair ship, he
predicts his race's eternal hatred for the English.

"Russia a republic!" We raise our arms to heaven. "Germany a
republic!" We raise our arms to heaven.

And the great voices, the poets, the singers--what have the great
voices said? They have sung the praises of the victor's laurels
without knowing what they are. You, old Homer, bard of the lisping
tribes of the coasts, with your serene and venerable face sculptured in
the likeness of your great childlike genius, with your three times
millennial lyre and your empty eyes--you who led us to Poetry! And
you, herd of poets enslaved, who did not understand, who lived before
you could understand, in an age when great men were only the domestics
of great lords--and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulent
pride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, you
unwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreath
without knowing what it is.

There are dazzlings, and solemnities and ceremonies, to amuse and
excite the common people, to dim their sight with bright colors, with
the glitter of the badges and stars that are crumbs of royalty, to
inflame them with the jingle of bayonets and medals, with trumpets and
trombones and the big drum, and to inspire the demon of war in the
excitable feelings of women and the inflammable credulity of the young.
I see the triumphal ar