d loyal
to any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the
difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose--to a splendor
and a noon-day prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the
records of his people, and became a byeword amongst his posterity for a
thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor,
forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest
which she had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs
that rose in her native Domremy, as echoes to the departing steps of
invaders. She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs which
celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. No! for her voice was then
silent: No! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl!
whom, from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and
self-sacrifice, this was amongst the strongest pledges for _thy_ side,
that never once--no, not for a moment of weakness--didst thou revel in the
vision of coronets and honor from man. Coronets for thee! O no! Honors, if
they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood.[2] Daughter
of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be
sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but she will not
hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a robe of honor,
but she will be found _en contumace_. When the thunders of universal
France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor
shepherd girl that gave up all for her country--thy ear, young shepherd
girl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer and to do, that was
thy portion in this life; to _do_--never for thyself, always for others;
to _suffer_--never in the persons of generous champions, always in thy
own--that was thy destiny; and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself.
Life, thou saidst, is short: and the sleep which is in the grave, is long!
Let me use that life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams
destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. This pure creature--pure
from every suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was
pure in senses more obvious--never once did this holy child, as regarded
herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet
her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw not in
vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery sc