“Oh, what a multitude of thoughts arise!” &c.

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing itself that should carry her from the kingdom of France Delivered to the eternal kingdom.

It is not requisite, for the honor of Joanna, nor is there, in this place, room to pursue her brief career of action.  That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part of her story:  the intellectual part is, the saintly passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution.  It is unfortunate, therefore, for Southey’s “Joan of Arc,” (which however should always be regarded as a juvenile effort,) that, precisely when her real glory begins, the poem ends.  But this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity.  Joanna’s history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, and both could not have been presented to the eye in one poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme, or else by involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, in the latter;—­this might have been done—­it might have been communicated to a fellow-prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself, in the same way that Virgil has contrived to acquaint the reader, through the hero’s mouth, with earlier adventures that, if told by the poet speaking in his own person, would have destroyed the unity of his fable.  The romantic interest of the early and irrelate incidents (last night of Troy, &c.) is thrown as an affluent into the general river of the personal narrative, whilst yet the capital current of the epos, as unfolding ihe origin and incunabula of Rome, is not for a moment suffered to be modified by events so subordinate and so obliquely introduced.  It is sufficient, as concerns this section of Joanna’s life to say—­that she fulfilled, to the height of her promises, the restoration of the prostrate throne.  France had become a province of England; and for the ruin of both, if such a yoke could be maintained.  Dreadful pecuniary exhaustion caused the English energy to droop; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with a corresponding felicity of audacity and suddenness (that were in themselves portentous) for introducing the wedge of French native resources, for rekindling the national pride, and for planting the Dauphin once more upon his feet.  When Joanna appeared, he had been on the point of giving up the struggle with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France.  She taught him to blush for such abject counsels.  She liberated Orleans, that great city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the war, and then beleaguered by the English with an elaborate application of engineering skill unprecedented in Europe.  Entering the city after sunset, on the 29th of April, she sang mass