, and do it. But the world laughed, mocking the
severe-benevolence of a People's-Friend; and his idea could not become
an action, but only a fixed-idea. Lo, now, however, he has come down
from his Stylites Pillar, to a Tribune particuliere; here now, without
the dirks, without the muffs at least, were it not grown possible,--now
in the knot of the crisis, when salvation or destruction hangs in the
hour!

The Ice-Tower of Avignon was noised of sufficiently, and lives in
all memories; but the authors were not punished: nay we saw Jourdan
Coupe-tete, borne on men's shoulders, like a copper Portent, 'traversing
the cities of the South.'--What phantasms, squalid-horrid, shaking their
dirk and muff, may dance through the brain of a Marat, in this dizzy
pealing of tocsin-miserere, and universal frenzy, seek not to guess,
O Reader! Nor what the cruel Billaud 'in his short brown coat was
thinking;' nor Sergent, not yet Agate-Sergent; nor Panis the confident
of Danton;--nor, in a word, how gloomy Orcus does breed in her gloomy
womb, and fashion her monsters, and prodigies of Events, which thou
seest her visibly bear! Terror is on these streets of Paris; terror and
rage, tears and frenzy: tocsin-miserere pealing through the air; fierce
desperation rushing to battle; mothers, with streaming eyes and wild
hearts, sending forth their sons to die. 'Carriage-horses are seized by
the bridle,' that they may draw cannon; 'the traces cut, the carriages
left standing.' In such tocsin-miserere, and murky bewilderment of
Frenzy, are not Murder, Ate, and all Furies near at hand? On slight
hint, who knows on how slight, may not Murder come; and, with her
snaky-sparkling hand, illuminate this murk!

How it was and went, what part might be premeditated, what was
improvised and accidental, man will never know, till the great Day of
Judgment make it known. But with a Marat for keeper of the Sovereign's
Conscience--And we know what the ultima ratio of Sovereigns, when they
are driven to it, is! In this Paris there are as many wicked men, say a
hundred or more, as exist in all the Earth: to be hired, and set on;
to set on, of their own accord, unhired.--And yet we will remark that
premeditation itself is not performance, is not surety of performance;
that it is perhaps, at most, surety of letting whosoever wills perform.
From the purpose of crime to the act of crime there is an abyss;
wonderful to think of. The finger lies on the pistol; but the man