For seven years, after his return from the East, from 1254 to 1261, he appeared to think no more of it; and there is nothing to show that he spoke of it even to his most intimate confidants.
But, in spite of apparent tranquillity, he lived, so far, in a ferment of imagination and a continual fever, resembling in that respect, though the end aimed at was different, those great men, ambitious warriors or politicians, of natures forever at boiling point, for whom nothing is sufficient, and who are constantly fostering, beyond the ordinary course of events, some vast and strange desire, the accomplishment of which becomes for them a fixed idea and an insatiable passion.

As Alexander and Napoleon were incessantly forming some new design, or, to speak more correctly, some new dream of conquest and dominion, in the same way St.
Louis, in his pious ardor, never ceased to aspire to a re-entry of Jerusalem, to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, and to the victory of Christianity over Mohammedanism in the East, always flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would recall him to his interrupted work.

It has already been told, at the termination, in the preceding chapter, of the crusaders' history, how he had reason to suppose, in 1261, that circumstances were responding to his desire; how he first of all prepared, noiselessly and patiently, for his second crusade; how, after seven years' labor, less and less concealed as days went on, he proclaimed his purpose, and swore to accomplish it in the following year; and how at last, in the month of March, 1270, against the will of France, of the pope, and even of the majority of his comrades, he actually set out--to go and die, on the 25th of the following August, before Tunis, without having dealt the Mussulmans of the East even the shadow of an effectual blow, having no strength to do more than utter, from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, the cry of Jerusalem! Jerusalem! and, at the last moment, as he lay in sackcloth and ashes, pronouncing merely these parting words: "Father, after the example of our Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!" Even the crusader was extinct in St.Louis; and only the Christian remained.
The world has seen upon the throne greater captains, more profound politicians, vaster and more brilliant intellects, princes who have exercised, beyond their own lifetime, a more powerful and a more lasting influence than St.Louis; but it has never seen a rarer king, never seen a man who could possess, as he did, sovereign power without contracting the passions and vices natural to it, and who, in this respect, displayed in his government human virtues exalted to the height of Christian.

For all his moral sympathy, and superior as he was to his age, St.Louis, nevertheless, shared, and even helped to prolong, two of its greatest mistakes; as a Christian he misconceived the rights of conscience in respect of religion, and, as a king, he brought upon his people deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise.

War against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to undergo.