itself they cannot touch. If they check it in one place, it invades them
in another. They cannot build a wall across the whole earth; and, even
if they could, it would pass over its summit! Chains cannot bind it, for
it is immaterial--dungeons enclose it, for it is universal. Over the
faggot and the scaffold--over the bleeding bodies of its defenders which
they pile against its path, it sweeps on with a noiseless but unceasing
march. Do they levy armies against it, it presents to them no palpable
object to oppose. Its camp is the universe; its asylum is the bosoms of
their own soldiers. Let them depopulate, destroy as they please, to each
extremity of the earth; but as long as they have a single supporter
themselves--as long as they leave a single individual into whom that
spirit can enter--so long they will have the same labours to encounter,
and the same enemy to subdue."

As Riego's voice ceased, Falkland gazed upon him with a mingled pity and
admiration. Sour and ascetic as was the mind of that hopeless and
disappointed man, he felt somewhat of a kindred glow at the pervading and
holy enthusiasm of the patriot to whom he had listened; and though it was
the character of his own philosophy to question the purity of human
motives, and to smile at the more vivid emotions he had ceased to feel,
he bowed his soul in homage to those principles whose sanctity he
acknowledged, and to that devotion of zeal and fervour with which their
defender cherished and enforced them. Falkland had joined the
constitutionalists with respect, but not ardour, for their cause. He
demanded excitation; he cared little where he found it. He stood in this
world a being who mixed in all its changes, performed all its offices,
took, as if by the force of superior mechanical power, a leading share in
its events; but whose thoughts and soul were as offsprings of another
planet, imprisoned in a human form, and _longing for their home_!