There is no sight on earth more singular, or more awful, than a great nation going to war. I saw the scene in its highest point of view, by seeing it in England. Its perfect freedom, its infinite, and often conflicting, variety of opinion--its passionate excitement, and its stupendous power, gave the summons to hostilities a character of interest, of grandeur, and of indefinite but vast purposes, unexampled in any other time, or in any other country. When one of the old monarchies commenced war, the operation, however large and formidable, was simple. A monarch resolved, a council sat, less to guide than to echo his resolution; an army marched, invaded the enemy's territory, fought a battle--perhaps a dubious one--rested on its arms; and while _Te Deum_ was sung in both capitals alike for the "victory" of neither, the ministers of both were constructing an armistice, a negotiation, and a peace--each and all to be null and void on the first opportunity. But the war of England was a war of the nation--a war of wrath and indignation--a war of the dangers of civilized society entrusted to a single championship--a great effort of human nature to discharge, in the shape of blood, a disease which was sapping the vitals of Europe; or in a still higher, and therefore a more faithful view, the gathering of a tempest, which, after sweeping France in its fury, was to restore the exhausted soil and blasted vegetation of monarchy throughout the Continent; and in whose highest, England, serene and undismayed, was to "Ride in the whirlwind, and direct the storm." I must acknowledge, that I looked upon the coming conflict with a strange sense of mingled alarm and rejoicing. For the latter feeling, perhaps I ought to make some apology; but I was young, ardent, and ambitious. My place in life was unfixed; standing in that unhappy middle position, in which stands a man of birth too high to suffer his adoption of the humbler means of existence, and yet of resources too inadequate to sustain him without action--nay, bold and indefatigable exertion. I, at the moment, felt a very inferior degree of compunction at the crisis which offered to give me at least a chance of being seen, known, and understood among men. I felt like a man whose ship was stranded, and who saw the storm lifting the surges that were to lift him along with them; or like the traveller in an earthquake, who saw the cleft in the ground swallowing up the river which had hitherto presented an impassable obstacle--cities and mountains might sink before the concussion had done its irresistible will, but, at all events, it had cleared his way.