not a
transitory ebullition of Bedlam, but a genuine product of this Earth
where we all live; that it was verily a Fact, and that the world in
general would do well everywhere to regard it as such.

Truly, without the French Revolution, one would not know what to make
of an age like this at all. We will hail the French Revolution, as
shipwrecked mariners might the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all
of baseless sea and waves. A true Apocalypse, though a terrible one, to
this false withered artificial time; testifying once more that Nature
is _preter_natural; if not divine, then diabolic; that Semblance is
not Reality; that it has to become Reality, or the world will take fire
under it,--burn _it_ into what it is, namely Nothing! Plausibility has
ended; empty Routine has ended; much has ended. This, as with a Trump of
Doom, has been proclaimed to all men. They are the wisest who will
learn it soonest. Long confused generations before it be learned; peace
impossible till it be! The earnest man, surrounded, as ever, with a
world of inconsistencies, can await patiently, patiently strive to do
_his_ work, in the midst of that. Sentence of Death is written down
in Heaven against all that; sentence of Death is now proclaimed on the
Earth against it: this he with his eyes may see. And surely, I
should say, considering the other side of the matter, what enormous
difficulties lie there, and how fast, fearfully fast, in all countries,
the inexorable demand for solution of them is pressing on,--he may
easily find other work to do than laboring in the Sansculottic province
at this time of day!

To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact
inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at
present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the
world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever
instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being
sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it
shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner
of down-rushing and conflagration.

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and
fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not any
hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in the
world! Nature, turned into a "Machine," was as if effete now; could not
any longer produce Great Men: