All day thy wings have fanned, And soon that toil shall end; Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend Soon o'er thy sheltered nest. Thou 'rt gone, the abyss of heaven He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, TRUTH, crushed to earth, shall rise again, CARLYLE. 1795 THOMAS CARLYLE was born in Scotland in 1795. He is the son of a Dumfriesshire farmer. He studied at Edinburgh University, and is said to have intended to enter the ministry, but abandoned the purpose. His first essay in literature was in contributing to a Cyclopædia, and to several magazines. Next he translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and in his labors acquired a warm and lasting love for German literature. Sartor Resartus, in which he laid the first substantial foundation of his fame, was published in book-form in 1834. It is one of his most characteristic compositions, exhibiting the originality, depth, and bri.liancy of his thought, and the mingled awkwardness and force of his style, in full relief. Three years later appeared his History of the French Revolution, a work which has never been surpassed in point of careful research, vigor, and graphic power of narrative. Of his later books we can mention only the names: Charlism, Hero-Worship, Past and Present, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Lives of Schiller and Sterling, The Life of Frederick the Great, etc. Mr. Carlyle is the most aggressive, and perhaps we may say the most audacious, writer of his age; he attacks on all sides, without fear or favor. His chief bugbear is "shams"; whatever is hollow or false or pretentious invites his relentless denunciation. He has virtually set himself up as the censor and reformer of the world, and has succeeded in his assumed role as well as any mortal could. His intuitions are wonderfully keen, his judgment quick and generally sound, and his love of right and hatred of wrong are so fervent as to animate all his writings with marvelous potency. He has exercised, perhaps, a mightier influence on the thought of the nineteenth century than any other living man. Our first and third extracts are from his History of the French Revolution; the second, from Sartor Resartus. EXECUTION OF MARIE-ANTOINETTE.* ON Monday, the 14th of October, 1793, a Cause is pending in the Palais de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as these old stone walls never witnessed, - the Trial of Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of Queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier-Tinville's Judgment-bar, answering for her life. The Indictment was delivered her last night. To such changes of human fortune what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate..... Marie-Antoinette, in this her abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm; "she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the piano." You discern not without interest, across that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown * Marie-Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria and Queen of France, was condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the French Republicans, and was executed on the 16th October, 1793. See Burke's speech, page 39. Her husband, Louis XVI., had been guillotined on the 21st of January preceding. 66 contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm. words. "You persist then in denial?' My plan is not denial; it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that." -- At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out, - sentence of Death! Have you anything to say?" The Accused shook her head, without speech. Night's candles are burning out; and with her, too, Time is finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day. This Hall of Tinville's is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to die. Two Processions, or Royal Progresses, three-and-twenty years apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast. The first is of a beautiful Archduchess and Dauphiness, quitting her mother's city, at the age of fifteen, towards hopes such as no other Daughter of Eve then had. "On the morrow,' says Weber, an eye-witness, "the Dauphiness left Vienna. The whole city crowded out; at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared; you saw her sunk back into her carriage, her face bathed in tears; hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands; several times putting out her head to see yet again this Palace of her Fathers, whither she was to return no more. She motioned her regret, her gratitude, to the good Nation, which was crowding here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears, but piercing cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to such expression of their sorrow. It was an audible sound of wail, in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last Courier that followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away." The young imperial Maiden of Fifteen has now become a worn, discrowned Widow of Thirty-eight, gray before her time. This is the last Procession: "Few minutes after the Trial ended, the drums were beating to arms in all Sections; at sunrise the armed force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of the Bridges, in the Squares, Crossways, all along from the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Révolution. By ten o'clock, numerous patrols were circulating in the Streets; thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven, Marie-Antoinette was brought out. She had on an undress of piqué blanc (white piqué); she was led to the place of execution in the same manner as an ordinary criminal: bound on a Cart, accompanied by a Constitutional Priest in Lay dress, escorted by numerous detachments of infantry and cavalry. These, and the double row of troops all along her road, she appeared to regard with indifference. On her countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride. To the cries of Vive la République (Live the Republic!) and Down with Tyranny, which attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke little to her Confessor. The tricolor Streamers on the house-tops occupied her attention, in the Streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré; she also noticed the Inscriptions on the house-fronts. On reaching the Place de la Révolution her looks turned towards the Jardin National, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave signs of lively emotion. She mounted the Scaffold with courage enough; at a quarter past Twelve, her head fell; the Executioner showed it to the people, amid universal long-continued cries of Vive la République." NIGHT VIEW OF A CITY. I LOOK down into all that wasp-nest or bée-hive, and witness their wax-laying and honey-making, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while His Serene Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down the low lane, where in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all. Couriers arrive bestrapped and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged-up in pouches of leather; there, top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls in the country Baron and his household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops painfully along, begging alms: a thousand carriages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out again with Produce manufactured. That living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going? From Eternity onwards to Eternity! These are apparitions: what else? Are they not souls rendered visible in Bodies, that took shape and will lose it, melting into air? Their solid Pavement is a Picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its heels and feather in its crown, is but of To-day, without a Yesterday or a To-morrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a living link : in that Tissue of History, which inweaves all Being: watch well, or it will be past thee, and seen no more. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient region of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting-dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! O! under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying, on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir* languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry villains; while Councilors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready; and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the borders: the Thief, still more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts; but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness, which is around and within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six men are to be hanged on the morrow; their gallows must even now be o' building. Upwards of five-hundred-thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal position; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid, dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them :- crammed-in, like * A gambler's game. |