is not
yet a murderer: nay, his whole nature staggering at such consummation,
is there not a confused pause rather,--one last instant of possibility
for him? Not yet a murderer; it is at the mercy of light trifles whether
the most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight twitch of a
muscle, the death flash bursts; and he is it, and will for Eternity be
it;--and Earth has become a penal Tartarus for him; his horizon girdled
now not with golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from
the depths of Nature sounding, Wo, wo on him!

Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder-mines of bottomless guilt
and criminality, 'if God restrained not; as is well said,--does the
purest of us walk. There are depths in man that go the length of lowest
Hell, as there are heights that reach highest Heaven;--for are not both
Heaven and Hell made out of him, made by him, everlasting Miracle
and Mystery as he is?--But looking on this Champ-de-Mars, with its
tent-buildings, and frantic enrolments; on this murky-simmering
Paris, with its crammed Prisons (supposed about to burst), with
its tocsin-miserere, its mothers' tears, and soldiers' farewell
shoutings,--the pious soul might have prayed, that day, that God's
grace would restrain, and greatly restrain; lest on slight hest or
hint, Madness, Horror and Murder rose, and this Sabbath-day of September
became a Day black in the Annals of Men.--

The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking Three,
when poor Abbe Sicard, with some thirty other Nonjurant Priests, in
six carriages, fare along the streets, from their preliminary House of
Detention at the Townhall, westward towards the Prison of the Abbaye.
Carriages enough stand deserted on the streets; these six move
on,--through angry multitudes, cursing as they move. Accursed Aristocrat
Tartuffes, this is the pass ye have brought us to! And now ye will break
the Prisons, and set Capet Veto on horseback to ride over us? Out upon
you, Priests of Beelzebub and Moloch; of Tartuffery, Mammon, and the
Prussian Gallows,--which ye name Mother-Church and God! Such reproaches
have the poor Nonjurants to endure, and worse; spoken in on them by
frantic Patriots, who mount even on the carriage-steps; the very
Guards hardly refraining. Pull up your carriage-blinds!--No! answers
Patriotism, clapping its horny paw on the carriage blind, and crushing
it down again. Patience in oppression has limits: we are close on the
Ab