It would be the most gigantic expedition, I admit, but practicable in the nineteenth century.

Through it France, at one stroke, would secure the independence of the West and the freedom of the seas." While uttering this his eyes shone with strange brilliancy, and he accumulates subjects, weighing obstacles, means, and chances: the inspiration is under full headway, and he gives himself up to it.

The master faculty finds itself suddenly free, and it takes flight; the artist,[1182] locked up in politics, has escaped from his sheath; he is creating out of the ideal and the impossible.

We take him for what he is, a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael Angelo.

In the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity, coherency, and inward logic of his dreams, in the profundity of his meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed, their fellow and their equal.