Amongst the works of faith and love which in all ages have been inspired by the precepts and the example of “the forgiving Christ,” the labours of Alexander on behalf of his perishing enemies undoubtedly deserve a place. It is good for the world to keep such deeds in remembrance, although to those who do them the world’s remembrance may avail but little. It was not the motive that inspired, nor will it be the reward that crowns them.
A few years later, at Cherson in the Crimea, Alexander stood beside the grave of a philanthropist whose character and work he held in genuine veneration—John Howard, the prisoners’ friend. With his own hand he designed a monument to mark the resting-place of Christ’s honoured servant, choosing for its sole inscription those words of Christ himself—“I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came unto me.” “Where the kings of the nations lie in glory, every one in his own house,” the Czar Alexander Paulovitch has his stately sleeping-place; and well might it bear the same inscription. No human hand has placed it there; but we doubt not Divine lips will one day utter the commendation, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto Me.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
ONE YEAR AFTERWARDS.
“War is mercy, glory, fame,
Fought in Freedom’s holy cause,
Freedom such as man may claim
Under God’s restraining laws.”
Wordsworth.
Between opening month of 1813 and that of the following year a great change swept over Europe. Men of Teutonic race, true-hearted sons of their dear Fatherland, look back upon that era with honourable pride. They talk with enthusiasm of “the war of liberation,” telling gratefully beside their hearths, or by the vine-clad banks of their glorious “German Rhine,” how prince and peasant armed for the fight, and flung from them the intolerable yoke of the foreign oppressor. Körner’s patriotic lyrics thrilled every heart, and many another tuneful voice, then and since, has chanted the pæan of Germany’s deliverance,—
“How the crowned eagle spread again
His pinion to the sun;
And the strong land shook off its chain,
So was the triumph won.”