-up their
life-system on that 'madness' quietus, no phenomenon could be more
alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor and
Historian, fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we can
believe it, and died of the Three Days! It was surely not a very
heroic death;--little better than Racine's, dying because Louis
Fourteenth looked sternly on him once. The world had stood some
considerable shocks, in its time; might have been expected to survive
the Three Days too, and be found turning on its axis after even them!
The Three Days told all mortals that the old French Revolution, mad as
it might look, was not a transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a
genuine product of this Earth where we all live; that it was verily a
Fact, and that the world in general would do well everywhere to regard
it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make
of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as
shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all
of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one,
to this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that
Nature is _preter_natural; if not divine, then diabolic; that
Semblance is not reality; that it has to become reality, or the world
will take-fire under it,--burn _it_ into what it is, namely Nothing!
Plausibility has ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This,
as with a Trump of Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are the
wisest who will learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it
be learned; peace impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded,
as ever, with a world of inconsistencies, can await patiently,
patiently strive to do _his_ work, in the midst of that. Sentence of
Death is written down in Heaven against all that; sentence of Death is
now proclaimed on the Earth against it: this he with his eyes may see.
And surely, I should say, considering the other side of the matter,
what enormous difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, in
all countries, the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressing
on,--he may easily find other work to do than labouring in the
Sansculottic province at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of 'Hero-worship' becomes a fact
inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world
at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of
the world.