Now this, rightly understood, not only gives no support to any such belief; but proves that the truth is in direct opposition to it.

The history of all ages; tumults after tumults; wars, foreign or civil, with short or with no breathing-spaces, from generation to generation; wars--why and wherefore?
yet with courage, with perseverance, with self-sacrifice, with enthusiasm--with cruelty driving forward the cruel man from its own terrible nakedness, and attracting the more benign by the accompaniment of some shadow which seems to sanctify it; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions--vanishing and reviving and piercing each other like the Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the bosom of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject; the blast, like the blast of the desart, which sweeps perennially through a frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening but ever quickening descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition;--these inward existences, and the visible and familiar occurrences of daily life in every town and village; the patient curiosity and contagious acclamations of the multitude in the streets of the city and within the walls of the theatre; a procession, or a rural dance; a hunting, or a horse-race; a flood, or a fire; rejoicing and ringing of bells for an unexpected gift of good fortune, or the coming of a foolish heir to his estate;--these demonstrate incontestibly that the passions of men (I mean, the soul of sensibility in the heart of man)--in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them--do immeasurably transcend their objects.

The true sorrow of humanity consists in this;--not that the mind of man fails; but that the course and demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires: and hence that, which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused.
But--with the remembrance of what has been done, and in the face of the interminable evils which are threatened--a Spaniard can never have cause to complain of this, while a follower of the tyrant remains in arms upon the Peninsula.
Here then they, with whom I _hope_, take their stand.

There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages.

We would not be rejected from this community: and therefore do we hope.