Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/71

60 and his forehead contracted, as under some unbearable physical pain; hardly thirty years were over his head, all the maturity of life lay before him; he felt that he had the genius in him to rule men and to carve himself a memory in history; he had the ability that would have made him a supreme and triumphant statesman; he would have been this, he would not have failed to be it, had opportunity been his. As it was, he saw the portals of fame closed to him through the disadvantages of position, and the exercise of power denied to him because he had not the primary power of money. Impatient and bitter at his exile from legitimate fields he had thrown himself into bastard politics; and adventured his fate with the secret and uncertain gambling of intrigue and conspiracy.

He hated Austria, and would have schemed night and day to humble her; beyond this feeling he had as little unison as might be with his associates; for the grandeur of theoretic republicanism, for the regeneration of Italy, for the freedom of Hungary or Poland, for the advance of the high-flown quixotism of Garibaldians, or for such poetic partisanship as breathed in "Casa Guidi Windows," he had never a single throb of sympathy. But he loved the power that it seemed to him he might obtain through