ing
over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years:
but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, or even Luther's Version
thereof?"

No less satisfactory is his sudden appearance not in Battle, yet on some
Battle-field; which, we soon gather, must be that of Wagram; so that
here, for once, is a certain approximation to distinctness of date.
Omitting much, let us impart what follows:--

"Horrible enough! A whole Marchfeld strewed with shell-splinters,
cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; stragglers still
remaining not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps; ay, there
lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and Virtue has been
blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed down out of sight,
like blown Egg-shells!--Did Nature, when she bade the Donau bring down
his mould-cargoes from the Carinthian and Carpathian Heights, and
spread them out here into the softest, richest level,--intend thee, O
Marchfeld, for a corn-bearing Nursery, whereon her children might be
nursed; or for a Cockpit, wherein they might the more commodiously be
throttled and tattered? Were thy three broad Highways, meeting here from
the ends of Europe, made for Ammunition-wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams
and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built Casemates, wherein the house of
Hapsburg might batter with artillery, and with artillery be battered?
Konig Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks, dies under Rodolf's truncheon;
here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon under Napoleon's: within which five
centuries, to omit the others, how has thy breast, fair Plain, been
defaced and defiled! The greensward is torn up and trampled down; man's
fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge-rows, and pleasant dwellings,
blown away with gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies a desolate,
hideous Place of Skulls.--Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall
these Powder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all
that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, absorbed into manure; and
next year the Marchfeld will be green, nay greener. Thrifty unwearied
Nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy
own,--how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring Life for
the Living!

"What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and
upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil,
in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls.
From