es
(Bruxelles, 1826), p. 96.)

At two of the clock, Beaurepaire, as we saw, has shot himself at Verdun;
and over Europe, mortals are going in for afternoon sermon. But at
Paris, all steeples are clangouring not for sermon; the alarm-gun
booming from minute to minute; Champ-de-Mars and Fatherland's Altar
boiling with desperate terror-courage: what a miserere going up
to Heaven from this once Capital of the Most Christian King! The
Legislative sits in alternate awe and effervescence; Vergniaud proposing
that Twelve shall go and dig personally on Montmartre; which is decreed
by acclaim.

But better than digging personally with acclaim, see Danton enter;--the
black brows clouded, the colossus-figure tramping heavy; grim energy
looking from all features of the rugged man! Strong is that grim Son of
France, and Son of Earth; a Reality and not a Formula he too; and
surely now if ever, being hurled low enough, it is on the Earth and on
Realities that he rests. "Legislators!" so speaks the stentor-voice, as
the Newspapers yet preserve it for us, "it is not the alarm-cannon that
you hear: it is the pas-de-charge against our enemies. To conquer them,
to hurl them back, what do we require? Il nous faut de l'audace, et
encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace, To dare, and again to dare,
and without end to dare!" (Moniteur in Hist. Parl. xvii. 347.)--Right
so, thou brawny Titan; there is nothing left for thee but that. Old men,
who heard it, will still tell you how the reverberating voice made all
hearts swell, in that moment; and braced them to the sticking-place; and
thrilled abroad over France, like electric virtue, as a word spoken in
season.

But the Commune, enrolling in the Champ-de-Mars? But the Committee of
Watchfulness, become now Committee of Public Salvation; whose conscience
is Marat? The Commune enrolling enrolls many; provides Tents for them in
that Mars'-Field, that they may march with dawn on the morrow: praise to
this part of the Commune! To Marat and the Committee of Watchfulness
not praise;--not even blame, such as could be meted out in these
insufficient dialects of ours; expressive silence rather! Lone Marat,
the man forbid, meditating long in his Cellars of refuge, on his
Stylites Pillar, could see salvation in one thing only: in the fall of
'two hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads.' With so many score
of Naples Bravoes, each a dirk in his right-hand, a muff on his left,
he would traverse France