pe of yet once more Eurydice,--the Philomela song--granted after the
cruel silence,--the Halcyon song--with its fifteen days of peace, were
all sad, or joyful only in some vague vision of conquest over death. But
the Johnsonian vanity of wishes is on the whole satisfactory to
Johnson--accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope--triumphantly and
with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed
for the glorious discovery of the civilized ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss
Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not invented
gunpowder?--who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[68] There is no
Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens,
and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the Day of Judgment
become Republican, with everybody for a judge, and the flat of the
universe for the throne? There is no law, but only gravitation and
congelation, and we are stuck together in an everlasting hail, and
melted together in everlasting mud, and great was the day in which our
worships were born. And there is no gospel, but only, whatever we've
got, to get more, and, wherever we are, to go somewhere else. And are
not these discoveries, to be sung of, and drummed of, and fiddled of,
and generally made melodiously indubitable in the eighteenth century
song of praise?

47. The Fates will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that
century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious
pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough
without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping,
suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort,
and there bursts out a song at last again, a most curtly melodious
triplet of Amphisbaenic ryme, "_Ca ira_."

Amphisbaenic, fanged in each ryme with fire, and obeying Ercildoune's
precept, "Tong is chefe of mynstrelsye," to the syllable.--Don
Giovanni's hitherto fondly chanted "Andiam, andiam," become
suddenly impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A
cry--before it is a song, then song and accompaniment
together--perfectly done; and the march "towards the field of Mars. The
two hundred and fifty thousand--they to the sound of stringed
music--preceded by young girls with tricolor streamers, they have
shouldered soldierwise their shovels and picks, and with one throat are
singing _Ca ira_."[69]

Through all the springtime of 1790, from Br