The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
astonishing outburst:--
"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem
mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
"Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
of one living in death.
"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
there.
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