ven-sleepers awakening; awakening amazed at the noise they themselves
make. So strangely is Freedom, as we say, environed in Necessity; such
a singular Somnambulism, of Conscious and Unconscious, of Voluntary and
Involuntary, is this life of man. If any where in the world there was
astonishment that the Federation Oath went into grape-shot, surely
of all persons the French, first swearers and then shooters, felt
astonished the most.

Alas, offences must come. The sublime Feast of Pikes, with its
effulgence of brotherly love, unknown since the Age of Gold, has changed
nothing. That prurient heat in Twenty-five millions of hearts is not
cooled thereby; but is still hot, nay hotter. Lift off the pressure of
command from so many millions; all pressure or binding rule, except such
melodramatic Federation Oath as they have bound themselves with! For
'Thou shalt' was from of old the condition of man's being, and his weal
and blessedness was in obeying that. Wo for him when, were it on hest
of the clearest necessity, rebellion, disloyal isolation, and mere 'I
will', becomes his rule! But the Gospel of Jean-Jacques has come, and
the first Sacrament of it has been celebrated: all things, as we
say, are got into hot and hotter prurience; and must go on pruriently
fermenting, in continual change noted or unnoted.

'Worn out with disgusts,' Captain after Captain, in Royalist
moustachioes, mounts his warhorse, or his Rozinante war-garron, and
rides minatory across the Rhine; till all have ridden. Neither does
civic Emigration cease: Seigneur after Seigneur must, in like manner,
ride or roll; impelled to it, and even compelled. For the very Peasants
despise him in that he dare not join his order and fight. (Dampmartin,
passim.) Can he bear to have a Distaff, a Quenouille sent to him; say
in copper-plate shadow, by post; or fixed up in wooden reality over his
gate-lintel: as if he were no Hercules but an Omphale? Such scutcheon
they forward to him diligently from behind the Rhine; till he too bestir
himself and march, and in sour humour, another Lord of Land is gone,
not taking the Land with him. Nay, what of Captains and emigrating
Seigneurs? There is not an angry word on any of those Twenty-five
million French tongues, and indeed not an angry thought in their hearts,
but is some fraction of the great Battle. Add many successions of angry
words together, you have the manual brawl; add brawls together, with the
festering sorrows they