celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish. hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. "O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME; wherein through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago they were not; a little while and they are not, their very ashes are not. "Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane,1 and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on cof-heart; but warrior and war-horse are a vision; fins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; wellnigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the three- "So has it been from the beginning, so will score years into three minutes: what else was it be to the end. Generation after generation he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forthare shaped into a body, into an Appearance; issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's and that fade away again into air, and Invis- mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in ibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple each he expends: one grinding in the mill of scientific fact; we start out of Nothingness, Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come his fellow:-and then the Heaven-sent is rethere not tones of Love and Faith, as from called; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified even to Sense becomes a Vanished Shadow. Souls? And again, do not we squeak and Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering gibber2 (in our discordant, screech-owlish de- train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysteribatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful ous MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,-till Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing the scent of the morning-air3 summons us to Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes stormfully across the astonished Earth; then awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our pasfierce battle-shouts, at Issus and Arbela, remain sage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, alive? On the hardest adamant some footand his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Cam- print of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of paigns! Was it all other than the veriest the host will read traces of the earliest Van. Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling But whence?-O Heaven, whither? Sense tumult that made night hideous, flitted away?-knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to walking the Earth openly at noontide; some God. half-hundred have vanished from it, some half 1 The "Cock Lane Ghost" was a notorious impos ture perpetrated in London in 1762. 2 Hamlet, 1, i, 116. 3 Hamlet, I, v, 58. "We are such stuff As Dreams are made on, and our little Life 4 Cimmeria was a fabled country of perpetual The twelfth July morning is Sunday: the streets are all placarded with an enormoussized De par le Roi,2 inviting peaceable citizens to remain within doors,'' to feel no alarm, to gather in no crowd. Why so? What mean these placards of enormous size?" Above all, what means this clatter of military; dragoons, hussars, rattling in from all points of the compass towards the Place Louis Quinze : 3 with a staid gravity of face, though saluted with mere nicknames, hootings and even missiles? Besenvalt is with them. Swiss Guards of his are already in the Champs Elysées,5 with four pieces of artillery. Have the destroyers descended on us,§ then? From the Bridge of Sèvres to utmost Vincennes, from Saint-Denis to the Champ-de-Mars, we are begirt! Alarm, of the vague unknown, is in 1 City gates. 2 An order de part le roi, “by the authority of the king." 3 "Square of Louis XV."; a noted square west of the Tuileries, or royal residence; now the Place de la Concorde. 4 Then Commandant of Paris. 5 An avenue and public park extending westward from the Place de la Concorde. * The immediate cause of the French Revolution was a deficiency of revenue and the oppressive taxation of the people-the Commonalty, or Third Estate-to the exemption of the two other Estates, the Nobility and the Clergy. Necker, a Genevese statesman, who was Di rector General of Finance, convened the States-General, or legislative assemblies, at Versailles in May, 1789. As they failed to come to an agreement, the Third Estate resolved itself into a National Assembly with Such the object of forming a Constitution. Jean Paul Marat, at one time the Prince d'Artois's horse-leech (horse doctor): one of the earliest inciters to revolution, and a leader of the Jacobin party after it was formed. Words thus quoted by Carlyle are taken from various memoirs and contemporary documents. § Carlyle speaks from the point of view of the Parisian populace, or revolutionists, whom he later calls by the collective name of "Patriotism." every heart. The Palais Royal* has become a place of awestruck interjections, silent shakings of the head: one can fancy with what dolorous sound the noontide cannon (which the Sun fires at crossing of his meridian) went off there; bodeful, like an inarticulate voice of doom. Are these troops verily come out "against Brigands?" Where are the Brigands? What mystery is in the wind?-Hark! a human voice reporting articulately the Job 's-news:6 Necker, People's Minister, Saviour of France, is dismissed. Impossible, incredible! Treasonous to the public peace! Such a voice ought to be choked in the water-works;-had not the newsbringer quickly fled. Nevertheless, friends, make of it what ye will, the news is true. Necker is gone. Necker hies northward incessantly, in obedient secrecy, since yesternight. We have a new Ministry: Broglie the Wargod;7 Aristocrat Breteuil; Foulon who said the people might eat grass! Rumour, therefore, shall arise; in the Palais Royal, and in broad France. Paleness sits on every face: confused tremor and fremescence;8 waxing into thunder-peals, of Fury stirred on by Fear. But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:-Friends! shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be wellcome! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To arms!"To arms!" yell responsive the innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words, does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great moment.— disheartening news i. e., Minister of War 8 From Latin fremo, to growl. 9 like the ancient Sibyl, or inspired prophetess A palace, with galleries and gardens, built by Cardinal Richelieu in the heart of Paris. At this time it was occupied by the Duc d'Orléans (Philippe Egalité), one of the nobles who had joined the Commons, and its cafés were the resort of the more violent democrats. Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! | all things keep its own head whole. A new MinCockades; green ones;-the colour of Hope!-istry, with, as it were, but one foot in the As with the flight of locusts, these green tree- stirrup, cannot take leaps. Mad Paris is abanleaves; green ribands from the neighbouring doned altogether to itself. shops; all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table; "stifled with embraces, wetted with tears; has a bit of green ribbon handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius' Imageshop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds, and rest not till France be on fire! A What a Paris, when the darkness fell! European metropolitan City hurled suddenly forth from its old combinations and arrangements; to crash tumultuously together, seeking new. Use and wont will now no longer direct any man; each man with what of originality France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is he has, must begin thinking; or following those probably at the right inflammable point.-As that think. Seven hundred thousand individfor poor Curtius, who, one grieves to think, uals, on the sudden, find all their old paths, might be but imperfectly paid, he cannot old ways of acting, and deciding, vanish from make two words about his Images. The Wax- under their feet. And so there go they, with bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of D'Orleans, clangour and terror, they know not as yet helpers of France: these, covered with crape, whether running, swimming, or flying,-headas in funeral procession, or after the manner long into the New Era. With clangour and of suppliants appealing to Heaven, to Earth, terror: from above, Broglie, the war-god, imand Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears pends, preternatural, with his redhot cannonoff. For a sign! As indeed man, with his sin-balls; and from below a preternatural Brigandgular imaginative faculties, can do little or world menaces with dirk and firebrand: madnothing without signs; thus Turks look to ness rules the hour. their Prophet's Banner; also Osier Mannikins10 have been burnt, and Necker's Portrait has erewhile figured, aloft on its perch. In this manner march they, a mixed, continually increasing multitude; armed with axes, staves and miscellanea; grim, many-sounding, through the streets. Be all Theatres shut; let all dancing on planked floor, or on the natural greensward, cease! Instead of a Christian Sabbath, and feast of guinguette11 tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer's Sabbath; 12 and Paris, gone rabid, dance, with the Fiend for piper! Raging multitudes surround the Hôtel-deVille, 13 crying: Arms! Orders! The Six-andtwenty Town-Councillors, with their long gowns, have ducked under (into the raging chaos) ;shall never emerge more. Besenval is painfully wriggling himself out, to the Champ-de-Mars; 14 he must sit there in the cruellest uncertainty!" courier after courier may dash off for Versailles; but will bring back no answer, can hardly bring himself back. For the roads are all blocked with batteries and pickets, with floods of carriages arrested for examination: such was Broglie's one sole order; the Eil-deBoeuf,15 hearing in the distance such mad din, which sounded almost like invasion, will before 10 Images of Guy Fawkes, for example. 11 tea-garden 12 assembly of witches or wizards Happily, in place of the submerged Twentysix, the Electoral Club is gathering; has declared itself a "Provisional Municipality." On the morrow, it will get Provost Flesselles, with an Echevin or two,16 to give help in many things. For the present it decrees one most essential thing: that forthwith a "Parisian Militia" shall be enrolled. Depart, ye heads of Districts, to labour in this great work; while we here, in Permanent Committee, sit alert. Let fencible17 men, each party in its own range of streets, keep watch and ward, all night. Let Paris court a little fever-sleep; confused by such fever-dreams, of "violent motions at the Palais Royal;"'-or from time to time start awake, and look out, palpitating, in its nightcap, at the clash of discordant mutually-unintelligible Patrols; on the gleam of distant Barriers, going up all-too ruddy towards the vault of Night. On Monday, the huge City has awoke, not to its week-day industry: to what a different one! The working man has become a fighting man; has one want only: that of arms. The industry of all crafts has paused;-except it be the smith's, fiercely hammering pikes; and, in a faint degree, the kitchener's, cooking offhand victuals, for bouche va toujours, 18 Women too are sewing cockades;-not now of green, which 13 The Town Hall, which became the rallying place 16 The Provost of Merchants, with his municipal of the democratic party. 14 A military field, south of the Seine. 15 The hall of the king's counsellors, at Versailles. magistrates. 17 capable of defending being D'Artois19 colour, the Hôtel-de-Ville has meal-sacks," in time even "flocks and herds" had to interfere in it; but of red and blue, encumber the Place de Grève.2 our old Paris colours: these, once based on a ground of constitutional white, are the famed TRICOLOR, Which (if Prophecy err not) "will go round the world." 66 And so it roars, and rages, and brays: drums beating, steeples pealing; criers rushing with hand-bells: "Oyez,3 oyez, All men to their Districts to be enrolled!" The Districts have All shops, unless it be the Bakers' and Vint- met in gardens, open squares; are getting marners', are shut: Paris is in the streets;-shalled into volunteer troops. No redhot ball rushing, foaming like some Venice wine-glass has yet fallen from Bescnval's Camp; on the into which you had dropped poison. The tocsin, contrary, Deserters with their arms are conby order, is pealing madly from all steeples. tinually dropping in: nay now, joy of joys, Arms, ye Elector Municipals; thou Flesselles at two in the afternoon, the Gardes Françaises,+ with thy Echevins, give us arms! Flesselles gives what he can: fallacious, perhaps insidious promises of arms from Charleville; order to seek arms here, order to seek them there. The new Municipals give what they can; some three hundred and sixty indifferent firelocks, the equipment of the City-watch: "a man in wooden shoes, and without coat, directly clutches one of them, and mounts guard." Also as hinted, an order to all Smiths to make pikes with their whole soul. being ordered to Saint-Denis, and flatly declining, have come over in a body! It is a fact worth many. Three thousand six hundred of the best fighting men, with complete accoutrement; with cannoneers even, and cannon! Their officers are left standing alone; could not so much as succeed in "spiking the guns." The very Swiss, it may now be hoped, ChâteauVieux and the others, will have doubts about fighting. Our Parisian Militia,-which some think it were better to name National Guard, is prospering as heart could wish. It promised to be forty-eight thousand; but will in few hours double and quadruple that number: invincible, if we had only arms! Heads of Districts are in fervent consultation; subordinate Patriotism roams distracted, ravenous for arms. Hitherto at the Hôtel-deVille was only such modicum of indifferent firelocks as we have seen. At the so-called Arsenal, there lies nothing but rust, rubbish But see, the promised Charleville Boxes, and saltpetre,-overlooked too by the guns of marked Artillerie! Here then are arms enough? the Bastille. His Majesty's Repository, what-Conceive the blank face of Patriotism, when they call Garde-Meuble, is forced and ran- it found them filled with rags, foul linen, sacked: tapestries enough, and gauderies; but candle-ends, and bits of wood! Provost of the of serviceable fighting-gear small stock! Two Merchants, how is this? Neither at the Charsilver-mounted cannons there are; an ancient treux Convent, whither we were sent with gift from his Majesty of Siam to Louis Four- signed order, is there or ever was there any teenth; gilt sword of the Good Henri20; antique weapon of war. Nay here, in this Seine Boat, Chivalry arms and armour. These, and such safe under tarpaulings (had not the nose of as these, a necessitous Patriotism snatches Patriotism been of the finest), are "five thou greedily, for want of better. The Siamese sand-weight of gunpowder;" not coming in, cannons go trundling, on an errand they were but surreptitiously going out! What meanest not meant for. Among the indifferent fire- thou, Flesselles? 'Tis a ticklish game, that of locks are seen tourney-lances; the princely amusing" us. Cat plays with captive mouse: helm and hauberk glittering amid ill-hatted but mouse with enraged cat, with enraged heads, as in a time when all times and their National Tiger? possessions are suddenly sent jumbling! 66 Meanwhile, the faster, O ye black-aproned Smiths, smite; with strong arm and willing In such circumstances, the Aristocrat, the un-heart. This man and that, all stroke from head patriotic rich man is packing up for departure. to heel, shall thunder alternating, and ply the But he shall not get departed. A wooden-shod force has seized all Barriers, burnt or not: all that enters, all that seeks to issue, is stopped there, and dragged to the Hôtel-de-Ville: coaches, tumbrils,21 plate, furniture, many 19 Monseigneur d'Artois was an unpopular adherent of the king. 20 Henry of Navarre. 21 two-wheeled carts great forge-hammer, till stithy reel and ring again; while ever and anon, overhead, booms the alarm-cannon,-for the City has now got gunpowder. Pikes are fabricated; fifty thou 2 Now the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville. 4 The French Guards, the chief regiment of the 5 A regiment of Swiss troops. sand of them, in six-and-thirty hours; judge of answer which is worse than none. A Council whether the Black-aproned have been idle. Dig of Officers can decide merely that there is no trenches, unpave the streets, ye others, assidu- decision: Colonels inform him, 'weeping,' that. ous, man and maid; cram the earth in barrel- they do not think their men will fight. Cruel barricades, at each of them a volunteer sentry; uncertainty is here: war-god Broglie sits yonpile the whin-stones in window-sills and upper der, inaccessible in his Olympus; does not derooms. Have scalding pitch, at least boiling scend terror-clad, does not produce his whiff of water ready, ye weak old women, to pour it and grape-shot;* sends no orders. dash it on Royal-Allemand, with your skinny arms: your shrill curses along with it will not be wanting!-Patrols of the new-born National Guard, bearing torches, scour the streets, all that night; which otherwise are vacant, yet illuminated in every window by order. Strangelooking; like some naphtha-lighted City of the Dead, with here and there a flight of perturbed Ghosts. So at Versailles. But at Paris, agitated Besenval, before retiring for the night, has stept over to old M. de Sombreuil, of the Hôtel des Invalidest hard by. M. de Sombreuil has, what is a great secret, some eight-and-twentythousand stand of muskets deposited in his cellars there; but no trust in the temper of his Invalides. This day, for example, he sent twenty of the fellows down to unscrew those muskets; lest Sedition might snatch at them: but scarcely, in six hours, had the twenty unscrewed twenty gun-locks, or dogsheads (chiens) of locks,-each Invalide his dogshead! If ordered to fire, they would, he imagines, turn their cannon against himself. Truly, in the Château3 of Versailles all seems mystery: in the Town of Versailles, were we there, all is rumour, alarm and indignation. An august National Assembly sits, to appearance, menaced with death; endeavouring to defy death. It has resolved 'that Necker carries with him the regrets of the Nation.' It has sent solemn Deputation over to the Château, with entreaty to have these troops withdrawn. O poor mortals, how ye make this Earth bit-In vain: his Majesty, with a singular comter for each other; this fearful and wonderful posure, invites us to be busy rather with our Life fearful and horrible; and Satan has his own duty, making the Constitution! place in all hearts! Such agonies and ragings and wailings ye have, and have had, in all times: to be buried all, in so deep silence; and the salt sea is not swoln with your tears. Great meanwhile is the moment, when tidings of Freedom reach us; when the long-enthralled soul, from amid its chains and squalid stagnancy, arises, were it still only in blindness and bewilderment, and swears by Him that made it, that it will be free! Free? Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this Earth. Yes, supreme is such a moment (if thou have known it): first vision as of a flame-girt Sinai,1 in this our waste Pilgrimage, which thenceforth wants not its pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by night! Something it is even,-nay, something considerable, when the chains have grown corrosive, poisonous, to be free from oppression by our fellow-man.' Forward, ye maddened sons of France; be it towards this destiny or towards that! Around you is but starvation, falsehood, corruption and the clam of death. Where ye are is no abiding. Unfortunate old military gentlemen, it is your hour, not of glory! Old Marquis de Launay too, of the Bastille, has pulled up his drawbridges long since, and retired into his interior;' with sentries walking on his battlements, under the midnight sky, aloft over the glare of illuminated Paris;-whom a National Patrol passing that way, takes the liberty of firing at: 'seven shots towards twelve at night," which do not take effect. This was the 13th day of July 1789; a worse day, many said, than the last 13th was, when only hail fell out of Heaven, not madness rose out of Tophet,5 ruining worse than crops! 3 The residence of the king. 4 An establishment for disabled soldiers, not far *Broglie had boasted that he would settle the |