Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/438

 Our conversation was carried on in French, which Mazzini spoke with perfect ease, although with some of the accent peculiar to the Italians. He was constantly smoking while he spoke. He developed even in this confidential conversation between two men an eloquence such as in my long life I have hardly ever heard again—warm, insinuating, at times vehement, enthusiastic, lofty, and always thoroughly natural. The three greatest conversationalists with whom it has been my good fortune to come into touch were Mazzini, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bismarck. Of these Dr. Holmes was the most spirited in the “bel esprit” sense; Bismarck the most imposing and at the same time the most entertaining in point of wit, sarcasm, anecdote, and narratives of historical interest, brought out with rushing vivacity and with lightning-like illumination of conditions, facts and men. But in Mazzini's words there breathed such a warmth and depth of conviction, such enthusiasm of faith in the sacredness of the principles he professed, and of the aims he pursued, that it was difficult to resist such a power of fascination. While looking at him and hearing him speak I could well understand how he could hold and constantly augment the host of his faithful adherents, how he could lead them into the most dangerous enterprises and keep them under his influence even after the severest disappointments.

Mazzini had undoubtedly given up, if not formally, yet in fact, his membership in his church. But there was in him, and there spoke out of him, a deep religious feeling, an instinctive reliance upon a higher Power to which he could turn and which would aid him in the liberation and unification of his people. That was his form of the fatalism so often united with great ambitions. He had a trait of prophetic mysticism which sprung from the depths of his convictions and emotions, and was free of all charlatanism, and all