the new wine, which presently we
shall drink pure. Meanwhile, the saddest thing is the impossibility
(which I, for one, feel) to sympathise, to go along with, the _people_
to whom and to whose cause all my natural sympathies yearn. The
word 'Liberty' ceases to make me thrill, as at something great and
unmistakable, as, for instance, the other great words Truth, and
Justice; do. The salt has lost its savour, the meaning has escaped
from the term; we know nothing of what people will _do_ when they
aspire to Liberty. The holiness of liberty is desecrated by the sign
of the ass's hoof. Fixed principles, either of opinion or action, seem
clearly gone out of the world. The principle of Destruction is in the
place of the principle of Re-integration, or of Radical Reform, as we
called it in England. I look all round and can sympathise nowhere.
The rulers hold by rottenness, and the people leap into the abyss,
and nobody knows why this is, or why that is. As to France, my tears
(which I really couldn't help at the time of the expulsion of poor
Louis Philippe and his family, not being very strong just then) are
justified, it appears, though my husband thought them foolish (and so
did I), and though we both began by an adhesion to the Republic in
the cordial manner. But, just see, the Republic was a 'man in an iron
mask' or helmet, and turns out a military dictatorship, a throttling
of the press, a starving of the finances, and an election of Louis
Napoleon to be President. Louis Philippe was better than all this,
take him at worst, and at worst he did _not_ deserve the mud and
stones cast at him, which I have always maintained and maintain still.
England might have got up ('happy country') more crying grievances
than France at the moment of outbreak; but what makes outbreaks
now-a-days is not 'the cause, my soul,' but the stuff of the people.
You are huckaback on the other side of the Channel, and you wear out
the poor Irish linen, let the justice of the case be what it may.
Politics enough and too much, surely, especially now when they are
depressing to you, and more or less to everybody.... We are still
in the slow agonies of furnishing our apartment. You see, being
the poorest and most prudent of possible poets, we had to solve the
problem of taking our furniture out of our year's income (proceeds
of poems and the like), and of not getting into debt. Oh, I take no
credit to myself; I was always in debt in my little way ('small