Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
which she hides with her hands.
"There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?
"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!
"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
shall not dwell.
"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."
There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
consummate touch of greatness.
Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
peaceful France, and he exclaims:--
"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville.
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