drilled and inured, will become a phalanxed mass of Fighters;
and wheel and whirl, to order, swiftly like the wind or the whirlwind:
tanned mustachio-figures; often barefoot, even bare-backed; with sinews
of iron; who require only bread and gunpowder: very Sons of Fire, the
adroitest, hastiest, hottest ever seen perhaps since Attila's time. They
may conquer and overrun amazingly, much as that same Attila did;--whose
Attila's-Camp and Battlefield thou now seest, on this very ground;
(Helen Maria Williams, iii. 32.) who, after sweeping bare the world,
was, with difficulty, and days of tough fighting, checked here by
Roman Aetius and Fortune; and his dust-cloud made to vanish in the East
again!--

Strangely enough, in this shrieking Confusion of a Soldiery, which
we saw long since fallen all suicidally out of square in suicidal
collision,--at Nanci, or on the streets of Metz, where brave Bouille
stood with drawn sword; and which has collided and ground itself to
pieces worse and worse ever since, down now to such a state: in this
shrieking Confusion, and not elsewhere, lies the first germ of returning
Order for France! Round which, we say, poor France nearly all ground
down suicidally likewise into rubbish and Chaos, will be glad to rally;
to begin growing, and new-shaping her inorganic dust: very slowly,
through centuries, through Napoleons, Louis Philippes, and other the
like media and phases,--into a new, infinitely preferable France, we can
hope!--

These wheelings and movements in the region of the Argonne, which are
all faithfully described by Dumouriez himself, and more interesting to
us than Hoyle's or Philidor's best Game of Chess, let us, nevertheless,
O Reader, entirely omit;--and hasten to remark two things: the first
a minute private, the second a large public thing. Our minute private
thing is: the presence, in the Prussian host, in that war-game of the
Argonne, of a certain Man, belonging to the sort called Immortal;
who, in days since then, is becoming visible more and more, in that
character, as the Transitory more and more vanishes; for from of old
it was remarked that when the Gods appear among men, it is seldom in
recognisable shape; thus Admetus' neatherds give Apollo a draught of
their goatskin whey-bottle (well if they do not give him strokes with
their ox-rungs), not dreaming that he is the Sungod! This man's name is
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He is Herzog Weimar's Minister, come with
the small c