embark upon it, the failure and their consequent defection only served to strip this heroic soul of the last rags of selfishness, and consecrate it more utterly to the will of God and the duty that lay before it. A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must have passed through. "It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up their soul--like Robespierre--beneath some barren intellectual formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy of affection, as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days when sustained by my mother's smile, as full of fervid hope for others, at least, if not for myself. But during these fatal months there darkened round me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and deception as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness, a foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary in a desert world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. It was not only the overthrow for an indefinite period of every Italian hope, ... it was the falling to pieces of that moral edifice of faith and love from which alone I had derived strength for the combat; the scepticism I saw arising round me on every side; the failure of faith in those who had solemnly bound themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset to be choked with sorrows; the distrust I detected in those most dear to me, as to the motives and intentions which sustained and urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle.... When I felt that I was indeed alone in the world, I drew back in terror at the void before me. There, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me. Perhaps I was wrong, and the world right? Perhaps my idea was indeed a dream?... One morning I awoke to find my mind tranquil and my spirit calmed, as one who has passed through a great danger. The first thought that passed across my spirit was, _Your sufferings are the temptations of egotism, and arise from a misconception of life_.... I perceived that although every instinct of my heart rebelled against that fatal and ignoble definition of life which makes it to be a _search after happiness_, yet I had not completely freed myself from the dominating influence exercised by it upon the age.... I had been unable to realize the true ideal of love--love without earthly hope.... Life is a mission, duty therefore its highest law. From the idea of God I descended to faith in a mission and its logical consequence--duty the supreme rule of life; and having reached that faith, I swore to myself that nothing in this