This
has to be looked upon, and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator
or Duerer saw it.[133] The wreck of one guilty country does not infer the
ruin of all countries, and need not cause general terror respecting the
laws of the universe. Neither did the orderly and narrow succession of
domestic joy and sorrow in a small German community bring the question
in its breadth, or in any unresolvable shape, before the mind of Duerer.
But the English death--the European death of the nineteenth
century--was of another range and power; more terrible a thousandfold
in its merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, incalculably, in
its mystery and shame. What were the robber's casual pang, or the range
of the flying skirmish, compared to the work of the axe, and the sword,
and the famine, which was done during this man's youth on all the hills
and plains of the Christian earth, from Moscow to Gibraltar? He was
eighteen years old when Napoleon came down on Arcola. Look on the map
of Europe and count the blood-stains on it, between Arcola and
Waterloo.[134]
Not alone those blood-stains on the Alpine snow, and the blue of the
Lombard plain. The English death was before his eyes also. No decent,
calculable, consoled dying; no passing to rest like that of the aged
burghers of Nuremberg town.
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