urch and the convent of the Freres-Precheurs, known by the
then holy name of Jacobins; there the new Jacobins hold their club.
There, in that oblong hall, once the library of the peaceful monks,
assemble the idolaters of St. Robespierre. Two immense tribunes,
raised at either end, contain the lees and dregs of the atrocious
populace,--the majority of that audience consisting of the furies of
the guillotine (furies de guillotine). In the midst of the hall are
the bureau and chair of the president,--the chair long preserved by the
piety of the monks as the relic of St. Thomas Aquinas! Above this seat
scowls the harsh bust of Brutus. An iron lamp and two branches scatter
over the vast room a murky, fuliginous ray, beneath the light of which
the fierce faces of that Pandemonium seem more grim and haggard. There,
from the orator's tribune, shrieks the shrill wrath of Robespierre!

Meanwhile all is chaos, disorder, half daring and half cowardice, in the
Committee of his foes. Rumours fly from street to street, from haunt to
haunt, from house to house. The swallows flit low, and the cattle group
together before the storm. And above this roar of the lives and things
of the little hour, alone in his chamber stood he on whose starry
youth--symbol of the imperishable bloom of the calm Ideal amidst the
mouldering Actual--the clouds of ages had rolled in vain.

All those exertions which ordinary wit and courage could suggest had
been tried in vain. All such exertions WERE in vain, where, in that
Saturnalia of death, a life was the object. Nothing but the fall of
Robespierre could have saved his victims; now, too late, that fall would
only serve to avenge.

Once more, in that last agony of excitement and despair, the seer had
plunged into solitude, to invoke again the aid or counsel of those
mysterious intermediates between earth and heaven who had renounced the
intercourse of the spirit when subjected to the common bondage of the
mortal. In the intense desire and anguish of his heart, perhaps, lay a
power not yet called forth; for who has not felt that the sharpness
of extreme grief cuts and grinds away many of those strongest bonds
of infirmity and doubt which bind down the souls of men to the cabined
darkness of the hour; and that from the cloud and thunderstorm often
swoops the Olympian eagle that can ravish us aloft!

And the invocation was heard,--the bondage of sense was rent away from
the visual mind. He looked, and saw,--