One day he paced his cell in a mood of more than usual depression. "Fools and knaves are at large; robbery and murder have full scope; vanity and profligacy run their free career; then why is honest effort paralyzed, and buried here alive? There are those in these vaults,--men innocent of crime as I,--men who would have been an honor to their race,--who have passed a score of years in this living death. And canting fools would console them with saying that 'all is for the best.' I will sooner believe that the world is governed by devils, and that the prince of them all is bodied in Metternich. Why is there not in crushed hope, and stifled wrath, and swelling anguish, and frenzy, and despair, a force to burst these hellish sepulchres, and blow them to the moon! "It is but a weak punishment to which Milton dooms his ruined angel. Action,--enterprise,--achievement,--a hell like that is heaven to the cells of Ehrenberg. He should have chained him to a rock, and left him alone to the torture of his own thoughts; the unutterable agonies of a mind preying on itself for want of other sustenance. Action!--mured in this dungeon, the starved soul gasps for it as the lungs for air. 'Action, action, action!--all in all! What is life without it? A marsh, a quagmire, a rotten, stagnant pool. It is its own reward. The chase is all; the prize nothing. The huntsmen chase the fox all day, and, when they have caught her, fling her to their hounds for a worthless vermin. Alexander wept that he had no more worlds to conquer. What did it profit him that a conquered world lay already at his feet? The errant knights who roamed the world with their mistress's glove on their helmet, achieving impossibilities in her name,--which of them could have endured to live in peace with her for a six-month? The crusader master of Jerusalem, Cortes with Mexico subdued, any hero when his work is done, falls back to the ranks of common men. His lamp is out, his fire quenched; and what avails the stale, lack-lustre remnant of his days?