knowledge, what new phases, and results of event, its laws bring
forth. France is as a monstrous Galvanic Mass, wherein all sorts of far
stranger than chemical galvanic or electric forces and substances are
at work; electrifying one another, positive and negative; filling with
electricity your Leyden-jars,--Twenty-five millions in number! As the
jars get full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an
explosion.

Chapter 2.3.III.

Sword in Hand.

On such wonderful basis, however, has Law, Royalty, Authority, and
whatever yet exists of visible Order, to maintain itself, while it can.
Here, as in that Commixture of the Four Elements did the Anarch Old, has
an august Assembly spread its pavilion; curtained by the dark infinite
of discords; founded on the wavering bottomless of the Abyss; and keeps
continual hubbub. Time is around it, and Eternity, and the Inane; and it
does what it can, what is given it to do.

Glancing reluctantly in, once more, we discern little that is edifying:
a Constitutional Theory of Defective Verbs struggling forward, with
perseverance, amid endless interruptions: Mirabeau, from his tribune,
with the weight of his name and genius, awing down much Jacobin
violence; which in return vents itself the louder over in its Jacobins
Hall, and even reads him sharp lectures there. (Camille's Journal (in
Hist. Parl. ix. 366-85).) This man's path is mysterious, questionable;
difficult, and he walks without companion in it. Pure Patriotism does
not now count him among her chosen; pure Royalism abhors him: yet his
weight with the world is overwhelming. Let him travel on, companionless,
unwavering, whither he is bound,--while it is yet day with him, and the
night has not come.

But the chosen band of pure Patriot brothers is small; counting only
some Thirty, seated now on the extreme tip of the Left, separate
from the world. A virtuous Petion; an incorruptible Robespierre, most
consistent, incorruptible of thin acrid men; Triumvirs Barnave, Duport,
Lameth, great in speech, thought, action, each according to his kind; a
lean old Goupil de Prefeln: on these and what will follow them has pure
Patriotism to depend.

There too, conspicuous among the Thirty, if seldom audible, Philippe
d'Orleans may be seen sitting: in dim fuliginous bewilderment; having,
one might say, arrived at Chaos! Gleams there are, at once of a
Lieutenancy and Regency; debates in the Assembly itself, of succession
to the