"Residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse
to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. And there is a
like fluctuation of mood. Now he is formally justifying his past, now
musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have
been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough
intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist,
who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator,
"one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and
aspirations. The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in
the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but
deathless dream:--

"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there,
Imparting exultation to the hills."

[Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 385.]

But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and
given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of
sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men
are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting
ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not
unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of
himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual
course. The finest part of this æthereal voyage is that in which his
higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the