sea.

But for Austria, and even more for Russia, there was this to be said;
that the French Republican ideal was incomplete, and that they
possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often popular sense, what
was needed to complete it. The Czar was not democratic, but he was
humanitarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is something of the
Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the
White Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly softness as of
snow. Her ideas are often innocent and even childish; like the idea of
Peace. The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful truth for the Czar,
though only a blasphemous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich and
Castlereagh. Austria, though she had lately fallen to a somewhat
treasonable toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey and Prussia,
still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul.
Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which
even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary
political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they
darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of
sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread,
the stones were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If
justice counted on their shameful gibbets hundreds of the innocent dead,
they could still say that for them death was more hopeful than life for
the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there
had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of
Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists
showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth
not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even
earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
And in, a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.