Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/173

158 spirit and the dull sense of the Pagan world. It was the nineteenth century in America, the eighteenth in England, the seventeenth in France, and the fifteenth in Rome. The aged hands of the grandam still hold fast the key of her treasures. Her haughty front still said to Ruin and Desolation,—

So the writer first saw Rome in the winter of 1843. Her walls seemed those of a mighty sepulchre, in which even the new-born babe was born into death, The stagnation of thought, the prohibition of question, the denial of progress! Her ministers had a sweet Lethean draught with which to lull the first clamours of awakening life, to quiet the first promptings of individual thought. It was the draught of Circe, fragrant but fatal. And those who fed upon it became pathetic caricatures of humanity.

Not so did Margaret find Rome in 1847. The intervening years had wrought a change Within the defiant fortress of superstition a divine accident had happened. A man had been brought to the chair of St. Peter who felt his own human power too strongly to consent to the impotence of the traditional non possumus. To the timid questioning of Freedom from without he gave the bold answer of Freedom from within. The Papal crown had sometimes covered the brows of honest, heroic men. Such an one would he prove himself, and his first message was to that effect. Fortunate, fatal error! The thrones of the earth trembled at it. Crowned heads shook with the palsy of fear. The enslaved multitudes and their despised champions sent up a ringing shout to heaven, for the apocalyptic hour had come. The sixth seal was broken,