It is not merely a question of creed; Bismarck does not attack a creed. It is a broad question of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of _absolutism_ and freedom. Power was never given into the hands of the German Chancellor to be abused at the very outset, to oppress his subjects, Catholic and Protestant. It is not and it must not be supreme; and we very much mistake the genius of the great German people if they long allow it to continue so. It is not for him to deprive 14,000,000 of his people of their natural rights; the right to educate their children as they think proper, _and as the law allowed them_; the right to consider marriage a sacrament sanctified by God, and not a civil contract, to be loosed or unloosed at will by a magistrate; the right of listening to their most eminent teachers; the right of holding the seminaries and churches, built by their own money, for the use of their own priests; the right, above all, of believing that there is a God beyond all governments, from whom all government, which people make for themselves, springs; that God has set a law in the conscience which they must obey, even though princes and kings rage against it, and that it is not in the nature of things for this first and final law of conscience to clash with any other unless that other be wrong. When Prince Bismarck succeeds in eradicating these inborn notions from the minds of the German people, he will then have attained his supremacy; but that then is--never.
I know not which to love the more: The morning, with its liquid light; Or evening, with its tender lore Of silver lake and purple height.
To morn I say, "The fairer thou: For when thy beauties melt away, 'Tis but to breathe on heart and brow The gladness of the perfect day."
And o'er the water falls a hue That cannot sate a poet's eye: As though Our Lady's mantle threw Its shadow there--and not the sky.
But when has glared the torrid-noon, And afternoon is gasping low, The sunset brings a sweeter boon Than ever graced the orient's glow.
And I: "As old wine unto new, Art thou to morn, belovèd eve! And what if dies thy every hue In blankest night? We may not grieve.
"Thy fading lulls us as we dote. Nor always blank the genial night: For when the moon is well afloat, Thou mellowest into amber light."