, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could
be a truer Reality.

To explain, what is called explaining, the march of this Revolutionary
Government, be no task of ours. Men cannot explain it. A paralytic
Couthon, asking in the Jacobins, 'what hast thou done to be hanged if
the Counter-Revolution should arrive;' a sombre Saint-Just, not yet
six-and-twenty, declaring that 'for Revolutionists there is no rest but
in the tomb;' a seagreen Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall;
much more an Amar and Vadier, a Collot and Billaud: to inquire what
thoughts, predetermination or prevision, might be in the head of these
men! Record of their thought remains not; Death and Darkness have swept
it out utterly. Nay if we even had their thought, all they could have
articulately spoken to us, how insignificant a fraction were that of the
Thing which realised itself, which decreed itself, on signal given by
them! As has been said more than once, this Revolutionary Government is
not a self-conscious but a blind fatal one. Each man, enveloped in his
ambient-atmosphere of revolutionary fanatic Madness, rushes on, impelled
and impelling; and has become a blind brute Force; no rest for him but
in the grave! Darkness and the mystery of horrid cruelty cover it for
us, in History; as they did in Nature. The chaotic Thunder-cloud, with
its pitchy black, and its tumult of dazzling jagged fire, in a world
all electric: thou wilt not undertake to shew how that comported
itself,--what the secrets of its dark womb were; from what sources, with
what specialities, the lightning it held did, in confused brightness of
terror, strike forth, destructive and self-destructive, till it ended?
Like a Blackness naturally of Erebus, which by will of Providence
had for once mounted itself into dominion and the Azure: is not this
properly the nature of Sansculottism consummating itself? Of which
Erebus Blackness be it enough to discern that this and the other
dazzling fire-bolt, dazzling fire-torrent, does by small Volition and
great Necessity, verily issue,--in such and such succession; destructive
so and so, self-destructive so and so: till it end.

Royalism is extinct, 'sunk,' as they say, 'in the mud of the Loire;'
Republicanism dominates without and within: what, therefore, on the 15th
day of March, 1794, is this? Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out
of the Blue, has hit strange victims: Hebert Pere Duchene, Bibliopolist
Momoro, Clerk Vincent, General