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what a fund of Self-conceit there is in each of us, do you wonder that the balance should so often dip the wrong way, and many a Blockhead cry: See there, what a payment; was ever worthy gentleman so used!-I tell thee, Blockhead, it all comes of thy Vanity; of what thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.

thankfully bear what yet remain: thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him."'

NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM. FROM BOOK III,
CHAPTER VIII

"So true it is, what I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my "But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of your two grand fundamental world-enveloping wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our times and woven for us from before Birth itself, to write: 'It is only with Renunciation clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can yet to blind it,-lie all-embracing, as the unibe said to begin.' versal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavour to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

"I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? Say it in a word: is it not because thou art not HAPPY? Because the THOU (sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovingly cared-for? Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron ;4 open thy Goethe."

"Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, which when he put on, and wished himself Anywhere, behold he was There. By this means had Fortunatus triumphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were a Hatter to establish himself, in the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo,6 and make felts of this sort for all mankind, what a world we should have of it! Still stranger, should, on the opposite side of the street, another Hatter establish himself; and, as his fellow-craftsman made Space-annihilat"Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!"ing Hats, make Time-annihilating! Of both cries he elsewhere "there is in man a HIGHER would I purchase, were it with my last than Love of Happiness: he can do without groschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessed-on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you ness! Was it not to preach-forth this same were Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next HIGHER that sages and martyrs, the Poet and to clap on your other felt, and simply by wishthe Priest, in all times, have spoken and suf-ing that you were Anywhen, straightway to be fered; bearing testimony, through life and Then! This were indeed the grander: shooting through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, at wil from the Fire-Creation of the World and how in the Godlike only has he Strength to its Fire-Consummation; here historically and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine present in the First Century, conversing face to art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heav-face with Paul and Seneca:* there prophetens! and broken with manifold merciful Af5 The hero of a popular modern legend. flictions, even till thou become contrite, and "Dream-lane of Know-not-where." See introlearn it! O thank thy Destiny for these; ductory note.

Goethe.

4 Byron's verse is full of his personal grievances. See Eng. Lit., p. 251.

7 A very small silver coin of Germany, now obso

lete.

Certain spurious letters have come down to us which were said to have passed between Paul and Seneca,

it hither and thither. Art thou a grown baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not to see that the true inexplicable Godrevealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to

ically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet stand hidden in the depth of that late Time! "Or thinkest thou, it were impossible, unimaginable? Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past; is the Future non-extant, or only future? Those mystic faculties of thine, Mem-clutch aught therewith? Innumerable other of ory and Hope, already answer: already through this sort are the deceptions, and wonder-hiding those mystic avenues, thou the Earth-blinded stupefactions, which Space practices on us. summonest both Past and Future, and com- "Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your munest with them, though as yet darkly, and grand anti-magician, and universal wonderwith mute beckonings. The curtains of Yes-hider, is this same lying Time. Had we but terday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow the Time-annihilating Hat, to put on for once roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-Element, glance into the Eternal. Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, have devoutly read it there: that Time and Space are not God, but creations of God; that with God as it is a universal HERE, so is it an everlasting Now.

only, we should see ourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authentic Thaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone. But unhappily we have not such a Hat; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantily help himself without one.

"Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, built the walls of Thebes

along from the Stein-bruch (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets?

"And seest thou therein any glimpse of IM-by the mere sound of his Lyre?8 Yet tell me, MORTALITY?-O Heaven! Is the white Tomb Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo; sumof our Loved One, who died from our arms, moning out all the sandstone rocks, to dance and had to be left behind us there, which rises in the distance, like a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how many toilsome uncheered miles we have journeyed on alone,but a pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously with God!-Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever. This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayst ponder at thy leisure; for the next twenty years, or the next twenty centuries: believe it thou must; understand it

thou canst not.

man?

Was it not the still higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilising Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago: his sphere-melody,10 flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold accomplishments, and rich symphonies, through all our hearts; and modulates, and divinely leads them. Is that "That the Thought-forms, Space and Time, a wonder, which happens in two hours; and wherein, once for all, we are sent into this does it cease to be wonderful if happening in Earth to live, should condition and determine two million? Not only was Thebes built by the our whole Practical reasonings, conceptions, music of an Orpheus; but without the musie and imagings or imaginings,-seems altogether of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever fit, just, and unavoidable. But that they should, furthermore, usurp such sway over pure spiritual Meditation, and blind us to the wonder everywhere lying close on us, seems nowise so. Admit Space and Time to their due rank as Forms of Thought; nay, even, if thou wilt, to their quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, with thyself how their thin disguises hide from us the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it not miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand and clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth my hand, and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing

built, no work that man glories in ever done,

"Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near moving-cause, to its far-distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? Oh, (with the Time-annihilating Hat) could I transport thee direct from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of 8 Ar ancient tradition. Cp. p. 228, note 30, 10 See p. 321, note 8,

9 stone-quarry

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,' 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 gibber (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 our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts, at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made night hideous, flitted away?Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half

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Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence-O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

"We are such stuff

As Dreams are made on, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep!" 5

4. Cimmeria was a fabled country of perpetual

darkness.

5 The Tempest, IV. i, 156.

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zens

1

The twelfth July morning is Sunday: the streets are all placarded with an enormous sized De par le Roi,2 "inviting peaceable citito 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? Besenval is with them. Swiss Guards of his are already in the Champs Elysées, 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 oppres

sive 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 the object of forming a Constitution. Such in brief was the situation when this narrative opens, the King and his court at Versailles. just outside of Paris, hopelessly at odds with the National Assembly, and the starving populace in Paris and throughout France beginning to clamor for bread.

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,"

a human voice

Necker,

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! reporting articulately the Job's-news:6 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 inces santly, 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; waxing into thunder-peals, of Fury stirred on by Fear.

But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café

de Foy, rushing out, sibyllines 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.

6 disheartening news

7 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'Or léans (Philippe Egalité), one of the nobles who had joined the Commons, and its cafés were the resort of the more violent democrats.

A

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; What a Paris, when the darkness fell! "stifled with embraces, wetted with tears; " European metropolitan City hurled suddenly has a bit of green ribbon handed him; sticks forth from its old combinations and arrangeit in his hat. And now to Curtius' Image- ments; to crash tumultuously together, seeking Use and wont will now no longer direct shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four new. winds, and rest not till France be on fire! any man; each man with what of originality France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is he has, must begin thinking; or following those Seven hundred thousand individ- probably at the right inflammable point.-As that think. for 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, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs; thus Turks look to 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 guinguette tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer's Sabbath; 12 and Paris, gone rabid, dance,—with the Fiend for piper!

terror: from above, Broglie, the war-god, impends, preternatural, with his redhot cannonballs; and from below a preternatural Brigandworld menaces with dirk and firebrand: madness rules the hour.

"Parisian

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 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; Raging multitudes surround the Hôtel-de- confused by such fever-dreams, of "violent moVille,13 crying: Arms! Orders! The Six-and-tions at the Palais Royal;"'-or from time to twenty 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-deBœuf,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

time start awake, and look out, palpitating, in
its nightcap, at the clash of discordant mu-
tually-unintelligible Patrols; on the gleam of
Barriers, going up all-too ruddy
distant
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;
The industry
has one want only: that of arms.
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
18 "Eating must go on."

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