army, with its auxiliaries, setting out from Tiflis, to get as far as
the Ganges, where it needs only a thrust of the French sword to bring
down the whole of that grand commercial scaffolding throughout India.
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,[82] 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. His genius is of the same stature and the same structure; he
is one of the three sovereign minds of the Italian Renaissance. Only,
while the first two operated on paper and on marble, the latter
operates on the living being, on the sensitive and suffering flesh of
humanity.

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Notes:

[1] Reforms introduced by Napoleon after his coup d'état 9 Nov. 1799.
(SR.)