Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/126

Rh republics what chastity is to woman;" they spumed this austere virtue. Let them serve their despots. "Liberty withdrew from a people who disgraced her name." Let Dante burn his poetic brand of infamy into the forehead of his countrymen. But while freedom lasted, how fair was her blossom, how rich and sweet her fruit! What riches, what beauty, what science, letters, art, came of that noble stock! Italy was the world's wonder—for a day; its sorrow ever since. So the cactus flowers into one gorgeous ecstasy of bloom; then the excessive blossom, with withering collapse, swoons and dies of its voluptuous and tropical delight.

Liberty wanders from the North, through Italy, the fairest of all earthly lands ; then sits sadly down on the tallest of the Alps, and once more reviews those famous towns; the jewels that adorn the purple robe of history—all tarnished, shattered, spoiled. Slowly she turns her face northward and longs for hope. But even the Teutonic towns, where freedom ever wore a sober dress, were only spots of sunshine in a day of wintry storm. Swiss, German, Dutch, they were brief as fair. In Novogorod and in Poland, how soon was Slavonian freedom lost! So in a winter day in the country have I seen a little frame of glass screening from the northern snow and ice a nicely sheltered spot, where careful hands tended little delicate plants, for beauty and for use. How fair the winter garden seemed amid the wildering snow, and else all-conquering frost! The little roses lifted up their face and kissed the glass which sheltered from the storm. But anon, some rude hand broke the frail barrier down, and in an hour the plants were frozen, stiff and dead; and the little garden was all filled with snow and ice;—a garden now no more!

How often do you see in a great city a man perish in his youth, bowed down by lusts of the body. The graves of such stand thick along the highway of our mortal life,—numberless, nameless, or all too conspicuously marked. Other men we see early bowed down by their ambition, and they live a life far worse than merely sensual death—themselves the ghastliest monuments, beacons of ruin! And so, along the highway that mankind treads, there are the open sepulchres of nations, which perished of their sin;