City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.—­ Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervor, to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara?  These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years:  but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, or even Luther’s Version thereof?”

No less satisfactory is his sudden appearance not in Battle, yet on some Battle-field; which, we soon gather, must be that of Wagram; so that here, for once, is a certain approximation to distinctness of date.  Omitting much, let us impart what follows:—­

“Horrible enough!  A whole Marchfeld strewed with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; stragglers still remaining not so much as buried.  And those red mould heaps; ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the Life and Virtue has been blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed down out of sight, like blown Egg-shells!—­Did Nature, when she bade the Donau bring down his mould-cargoes from the Carinthian and Carpathian Heights, and spread them out here into the softest, richest level,—­intend thee, O Marchfeld, for a corn-bearing Nursery, whereon her children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit, wherein they might the more commodiously be throttled and tattered?  Were thy three broad Highways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for Ammunition-wagons, then?  Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built Casemates, wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with artillery, and with artillery be battered?  Konig Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks, dies under Rodolf’s truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon under Napoleon’s:  within which five centuries, to omit the others, how has thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced and defiled!  The greensward is torn up and trampled down; man’s fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge-rows, and pleasant dwellings, blown away with gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies a desolate, hideous Place of Skulls.—­Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall these Powder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her:  but all that gore and carnage will be shrouded in, absorbed into manure; and next year the Marchfeld will be green, nay greener.  Thrifty unwearied Nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy own,—­how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring Life for the Living!

“What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of war?  To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls.  From these, by certain ‘Natural Enemies’ of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men; Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and