a, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since
the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern
Barbarians, I have known nothing similar.

And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the
Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading article; or
getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament to harangue. And
for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe,
rough-ridden by every species of delirium, except happily the murderous
for most part, was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, at
the Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman,
whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and heaven-sent
evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine discerned to be
properly "the first stump-orator in the world, standing too on
the highest stump,--for the time." A sorrowful spectacle to men of
reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with
nothing in him but melodious wind and _soft sawder_, which he and others
took for something divine and not diabolic! Sad enough; the eloquent
latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and
declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a
little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas in the
pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently wretched manner
before long.

And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent,
more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace
rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of
Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible
and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what
a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable
mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind,
Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the
present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to
such revolutions--students, young men of letters, advocates,
editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt
desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions
and blowing it into flame,--might give rise to reflections as to
the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost
children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since