In the mean time, from this hurricane of disorder rises the clear ideal of the national genius.  Italy becomes self-conscious and attains the spiritual primacy of modern Europe.  Art, Learning, Literature, State-craft, Philosophy, Science build a sacred and inviolable city of the soul amid the tumult of seven thousand revolutions, the dust and crash of falling cities, the tramplings of recurrent invasions, the infamies and outrages of tyrants and marauders who oppress the land.  Unshaken by the storms that rage around it, this refuge of the spirit, raised by Italian poets, thinkers, artists, scholars, and discoverers, grows unceasingly in bulk and strength, until the younger nations take their place beneath its ample dome.  Then, while yet the thing of wonder and of beauty stands in fresh perfection, at that supreme moment when Italy is tranquil and sufficient to fulfill the noblest mission for the world, we find her crushed and trampled under foot.  Her tempestuous but splendid story closes in the calm of tyranny imposed by Spain.

Over this vertiginous abyss of history, where the memories of antique civilization blend with the growing impulses of modern life in an uninterrupted sequence of national consciousness; through this many-chambered laboratory of conflicting principles, where the ideals of the Middle Age are shaped, and laws are framed for Europe; across this wonder-land of waning and of waxing culture, where Goths, Greeks, Lombards, Franks, and Normans come to form themselves by contact with the ever-living soul of Rome; where Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swiss, and Germans at a later period battle for the richest prize in Europe, and learn by conquest from the conquered to be men; how shall we guide our course?  If we follow the fortunes of the Church, and make the Papacy the thread on which the history of Italy shall hang, we gain the advantage of basing our narrative upon the most vital and continuous member of the body politic.  But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in the crowd of other Christian races.  The history of the Church is cosmopolitan.  The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around Italy taken as a local center.  Its influence, moreover, was invariably one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the peninsula.  If we take the Empire as our standing-ground, we have to write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges.  After Frederick ii. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics.  A power so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted, so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen as the central point of their history.  If we elect the Republics, we are met with another class of difficulties.