And their Death.  That old Greek question again;—­yet unanswered.  The unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea-sand;—­white, a strange Aphrodite,—­out of the sea-foam; stretching its grey, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood.  This has to be looked upon, and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator or Duerer saw it.[133] The wreck of one guilty country does not infer the ruin of all countries, and need not cause general terror respecting the laws of the universe.  Neither did the orderly and narrow succession of domestic joy and sorrow in a small German community bring the question in its breadth, or in any unresolvable shape, before the mind of Duerer.  But the English death—­the European death of the nineteenth century—­was of another range and power; more terrible a thousandfold in its merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, incalculably, in its mystery and shame.  What were the robber’s casual pang, or the range of the flying skirmish, compared to the work of the axe, and the sword, and the famine, which was done during this man’s youth on all the hills and plains of the Christian earth, from Moscow to Gibraltar?  He was eighteen years old when Napoleon came down on Arcola.  Look on the map of Europe and count the blood-stains on it, between Arcola and Waterloo.[134]

Not alone those blood-stains on the Alpine snow, and the blue of the Lombard plain.  The English death was before his eyes also.  No decent, calculable, consoled dying; no passing to rest like that of the aged burghers of Nuremberg town.  No gentle processions to churchyards among the fields, the bronze crests bossed deep on the memorial tablets, and the skylark singing above them from among the corn.  But the life trampled out in the slime of the street, crushed to dust amidst the roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howling winter wind along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore.  Or, worst of all, rotted down to forgotten graves through years of ignorant patience, and vain seeking for help from man, for hope in God—­infirm, imperfect yearning, as of motherless infants starving at the dawn; oppressed royalties of captive thought, vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair.

A goodly landscape this, for the lad to paint, and under a goodly light.  Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator’s lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duerer’s spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and field; but light over all the world.  Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house,—­a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole,—­death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on the flesh, but daily, fastening on the spirit; death, not silent or patient, waiting his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; death with the taunting word, and burning grasp, and infixed sting.