Lord Palmerston, I fear, used the word "damned" more or less
flippantly. I use it reverently.
Rome, at her very weakest, has always been a river that wanders and widens
and that waters many fields. Berlin, at its strongest, will never be
anything but a whirlpool, which seeks its own centre, and is sucked down.
It would only narrow all the rest of Europe, as it has already narrowed all
the rest of Germany. There is a spirit of diseased egoism, which at last
makes all things spin upon one pin-point in the brain. It is a spirit
expressed more often in the slangs than in the tongues of men. The English
call it a fad. I do not know what the Italians call it; the Prussians call
it philosophy.
Here is the sort of instance that made me think of you. What would you feel
first, let us say, if I mentioned Michael Angelo? For the first moment,
perhaps, boredom: such as I feel when Americans ask me about
Stratford-on-Avon. But, supposing that just fear quieted, you would feel
what I and every one else can feel. It might be the sense of the majestic
hands of Man upon the locks of the last doors of life; large and terrible
hands, like those of that youth who poises the stone above Florence, and
looks out upon the circle of the hills.
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