Cleveland daily leader. [volume] ([Cleveland, Ohio]) 1865-1873, 1866-02-02

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NAPOLEON. 81
4 simple Lieutenant by chance, and q
General BY circumstance, he had shaken an
empire in his first campaign, and given a
kingdom to France. He had told the re-
publican story to millions Of Oriental slaves,
aud forty centuries of despotism had wit
messed his victories beneath the Egyptian
pyramids. Till then ne had been q soldier
| Of freedom, but, lacking the wisdom
TO decline greatness, he raised the sword
| consecrate to right against the liberty Of
| France. Victory recompensed him for the
loss Of honor; if he scattered the faggOts Of
a revolution divine in all its purposes, he
gave at least 20 Kings and parasites the
chsstisemeut of a parvenu- a plain Pile
beian, he put his foot upon tradition, and
mingled his blood with thatof the snointed.
He destroyed armies in a day and annihi-
lated nations in a week. He filled the
earth with the terror of his name; he
blotted out ancient political landmarks /;
/ he subdued nature as he had overrun
mankind. He made the avalanche
! harmless, and smoothed the ~steepness
of the mountain tops he put his hand to
piles which had rested unfinished for ages,
and they grew to perfect editices. The deep
currents of human feeling, the natural laws
which legislation neither sees nor alters,
bccll@a dTIt6tcu Wy LuAb luooll plOhCAolDAC
being. That he might confess no yestige of
human feebleness, he plucked his wi heart
from his bosom to show that he could not
feel. The wife whose arms had been around
him through all his dreams Of glory,
went weeping from his palace to the music
of her rivals wedding.
At last all Europe did him homage, but
he was not content. He shook his sceptre
at winter he-returRed the visits of those
unknown barbarians who came aforetime
like lOcusts out of Asia. At the confines Of
two continents his march was arrested ;
only tho whole world combined overthrow
him at last; they bound him, like Prone
theus, to a rock in the sea, but even there
he was absolute. A little year Of pining
and regretting, a moment of resolve, and a
flight across the waters like his own eagle /;
he stands on the soil of France once
more, Glad in mail, and as at in
vocation, the grave gives up his old
companions in arms. He is an emperor
for a span again. But what is he to-
night, this night after Waterloo!
A thousand dark "reminiscences arise; the
beggared duke, murdered in the ditch of the
old chateau the poor printer of Nuremberg,
shot dead because he could not be a French
man the simple, valient negro starved in
a dungeon because he had hoped too we'll
for his dusky race he sees these folks around
| him as he dashes on he thinks of the strewn
plains behind, where the gashed and MANNED
lie pleading for water, and the dying
curse him as their lives drift out.
TEE SPIRIT OF RIcHMoND.
At Richmond no single great ghost hovers,
as at Waterloo, to absorb all lesser sacrifices.
We do not feel the haunting presence on
these airy hills and by these soggy water
courses, of one proud fugitive figure who
lost the world in that capital. 1t was a des-
perate man that struggled at Bussels, it was
an indomitable race that fought for Rich
mOnd &
To my mind there is a spirit abroad in the
water courses and under the dismantled
batteries of Richmond, more awful than
the phantom of Bonaparte on the plains of
Brussels. Last Christmas day, in the drizzle
and darkness and keen winter wind, | Wis
tied the battlefelds of the rebel capital
again, who had seen them swept with iron
and tiled with flesh and bone-and in their
bleak and sterile solitude this awful giant,
like the spectre of the Broken, spanned
both horizons: his arms were folded; his
brows were knit; his lips were firm and
calm as the cannon's; his back was toward
the North. 1t wal Democracy, the great
Bonaparte of the West, with its watch in its
hand, saying, as he said at La Belle Al
eHHGC ~ ID 4uosbAOA VI LlA6 we nave
ninety chances in the hundred"
~JEFFERsoS DAVIS.
Let these loyal gentlemen, disciples of
Mr.. Abbott, who worship the character of
B~onaparte, make some consistent homage
to the brilliant directory of Jefferson Davis.
Both were men of destiny, and the figure of
the survivor is by far the nobler. OF the
fallen angels whose dark plumage swept
from our Senate halls, he made the most
courtly adieu. Of all traitors he was most
entirely in earnest. Of all decision, his
was the safest, the promptest and the most
enduring. He only, of the eonspirators,
felt that his quarrel with the Union was
irreconcilable, and stood by his capital till
the last, and has never yet advised submits
sion. His captivity has been belittled by
none of Bonaparte's querulousness. Blind
and gray and wasted, his dominions are
narrowed to a casemate, while the republic
he would overthrow reaches to the silent
oceans.
LEE.
In Robert Lee, the same austere Provi-
dence, to purify our Republicanism, shat
tered our faith in traditional responsibility.
nLo IoS- of IUaahfn1fop urapA III Al.