struction, destruction,
and reconstruction play their part in crises that have to be counted by
the thousands.

In the mean time, from this hurricane of disorder rises the clear ideal
of the national genius. Italy becomes self-conscious and attains the
spiritual primacy of modern Europe. Art, Learning, Literature,
State-craft, Philosophy, Science build a sacred and inviolable city of
the soul amid the tumult of seven thousand revolutions, the dust and
crash of falling cities, the tramplings of recurrent invasions, the
infamies and outrages of tyrants and marauders who oppress the land.
Unshaken by the storms that rage around it, this refuge of the spirit,
raised by Italian poets, thinkers, artists, scholars, and discoverers,
grows unceasingly in bulk and strength, until the younger nations take
their place beneath its ample dome. Then, while yet the thing of wonder
and of beauty stands in fresh perfection, at that supreme moment when
Italy is tranquil and sufficient to fulfill the noblest mission for the
world, we find her crushed and trampled under foot. Her tempestuous but
splendid story closes in the calm of tyranny imposed by Spain.

Over this vertiginous abyss of history, where the memories of antique
civilization blend with the growing impulses of modern life in an
uninterrupted sequence of national consciousness; through this
many-chambered laboratory of conflicting principles, where the ideals of
the Middle Age are shaped, and laws are framed for Europe; across this
wonder-land of waning and of waxing culture, where Goths, Greeks,
Lombards, Franks, and Normans come to form themselves by contact with
the ever-living soul of Rome; where Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swiss, and
Germans at a later period battle for the richest prize in Europe, and
learn by conquest from the conquered to be men; how shall we guide our
course? If we follow the fortunes of the Church, and make the Papacy the
thread on which the history of Italy shall hang, we gain the advantage
of basing our narrative upon the most vital and continuous member of the
body politic. But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in
the crowd of other Christian races. The history of the Church is
cosmopolitan. The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around
Italy taken as a local center. Its influence, moreover, was invariably
one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the
peninsula. If we take the Empire as our standing-ground