At Warsaw, where the three crowned heads held a meeting which seemed to personify all the disasters of the land, things looked even worse. It must be said that, to choose Warsaw as a place of meeting between these three masters of Poland--the Emperor of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia--and to choose it, too, just when all Europe was ringing with the enfranchisement of Italy, was to throw a challenge to our unhappy nation; nor was it long before popular feeling took up a challenge which was the second it had received from Alexander--his first having been that address to the nobility of Warsaw which he made after the Congress of Paris. After this, demonstrations increased. One religious service followed the other, in memory of the patriot-poets, Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and Slovaçki; and on November 29th, 1860, that song was heard, for the first time, which for a year has been the impassioned watchword of the multitude, which has echoes in cathedrals, and which has gone up from the humblest country churches--that ‘_Boze_ cos Polske’--‘Give us our country! Oh, Lord! give us our liberty!’ In a short time, the whole face of affairs had changed, and an electric thrill ran through the country. Perhaps it ought to be called a revolution; it certainly was a moral revolution, and it revealed that which had hardly as yet been suspected--the existence of a nation, unimpaired by suffering and by trial. To be a revolution, it had a strange beginning. There was no violence, no bloody intentions, no insurrections; but there were psalms, and prayers, and manifestations, at once enthusiastic and regulated; and there was an outburst, as energetic as it was unexpected, of that irresistible force which is called the soul of a nation.