It is a glorious time too for the exiles who return, and reap even a momentary fruit of their long sorrows.  Mazzini has been able to return from his seventeen years’ exile, during which there was no hour, night or day, that the thought of Italy was banished from his heart,—­no possible effort that he did not make to achieve the emancipation of his people, and with it the progress of mankind.  He returns, like Wordsworth’s great man, “to see what he foresaw.”  He will see his predictions accomplishing yet for a long time, for Mazzini has a mind far in advance of his times in general, and his nation in particular,—­a mind that will be best revered and understood when the “illustrious Gioberti” shall be remembered as a pompous verbose charlatan, with just talent enough to catch the echo from the advancing wave of his day, but without any true sight of the wants of man at this epoch.  And yet Mazzini sees not all:  he aims at political emancipation; but he sees not, perhaps would deny, the bearing of some events, which even now begin to work their way.  Of this, more anon; but not to-day, nor in the small print of the Tribune.  Suffice it to say, I allude to that of which the cry of Communism, the systems of Fourier, &c., are but forerunners.  Mazzini sees much already,—­at Milan, where he is, he has probably this day received the intelligence of the accomplishment of his foresight, implied in his letter to the Pope, which angered Italy by what was thought its tone of irreverence and doubt, some six months since.

To-day is the 7th of May, for I had thrown aside this letter, begun the 19th of April, from a sense that there was something coming that would supersede what was then to say.  This something has appeared in a form that will cause deep sadness to good hearts everywhere.  Good and loving hearts, that long for a human form which they can revere, will be unprepared and for a time must suffer much from the final dereliction of Pius IX. to the cause of freedom, progress, and of the war.  He was a fair image, and men went nigh to idolize it; this they can do no more, though they may be able to find excuse for his feebleness, love his good heart no less than before, and draw instruction from the causes that have produced his failure, more valuable than his success would have been.

Pius IX., no one can doubt who has looked on him, has a good and pure heart; but it needed also, not only a strong, but a great mind,

  “To comprehend his trust, and to the same
  Keep faithful, with a singleness of aim.”

A highly esteemed friend in the United States wrote to express distaste to some observations in a letter of mine to the Tribune on first seeing the Pontiff a year ago, observing, “To say that he had not the expression of great intellect was uncalled for” Alas! far from it; it was an observation that rose inevitably on knowing something of the task before Pius IX., and the hopes he had excited.  The problem