Amidst such extraordinary and unprecedented convulsions, it was with difficulty that a few courageous or far-seeing minds preserved their equilibrium; and even those who were least disposed to despair of the fortunes of the species, could see no end to the succession of disasters with which the world was menaced but in a great exertion of the renovating powers of nature, similar to that predicted, in a similar catastrophe, for the material world, by the imagination of the poet. "Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime, Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time! Near and more near your beaming cars approach, And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach. Flowers of the sky! ye, too, to Fate must yield, Frail as your silken sisters of the field; Star after star, from heaven's high arch shall rush, Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush; Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall, And Dark, and Night, and Chaos, mingle all; Till, o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form, Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same."[2] [2] DARWIN, _Botanic Garden_. But the destiny of man, not less than that of the material world, is balanced action and reaction, not restoration from ruin. Order is preserved in a way which the imagination of the poet could not have conceived. Even in the brief space which has elapsed since the convulsions began in Italy in January last, the reality and ceaseless action of the preserving laws of nature have been demonstrated. The balance is preserved in social life by contending passions and interests, as in the physical world by opposite forces, under circumstances when, to all human appearance, remedy is impossible and hope extinguished. The orbit of nations is traced out by the Wisdom of Providence not less clearly than that of the planets; there are centripetal and centrifugal forces in the moral as well as in the material world. As much as the vehement passions, the selfish desires, the inexperienced zeal, the expanding energy, the rapacious indigence, the mingled virtues and vices of man, lead at stated periods to the explosions of revolution,--do the desire of tranquillity, the interests of property, the horror at cruelty, the lessons of experience, the force of religion, the bitterness of suffering, reinduce the desire of order, and restore the influence of its organ, government. If we contemplate the awful force of the expansive powers which, issuing from the great mass of central heat, find vent in the fiery channels of the volcano, and have so often rent asunder the solid crust of the earth, we may well tremble to think that we stand suspended, as it were, over such an abyss, and that at no great distance beneath our feet the elements of universal conflagration are to be found.[3] But, strong as are the