The Thespian Art, unfortunately, one must still call it; for behold there, on this Field of Mars, the National Banners, before there could be any swearing, were to be all blessed.  A most proper operation; since surely without Heaven’s blessing bestowed, say even, audibly or inaudibly sought, no Earthly banner or contrivance can prove victorious:  but now the means of doing it?  By what thrice-divine Franklin thunder-rod shall miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently, life-giving, with health to the souls of men?  Alas, by the simplest:  by Two Hundred shaven-crowned Individuals, ’in snow-white albs, with tricolor girdles,’ arranged on the steps of Fatherland’s Altar; and, at their head for spokesman, Soul’s Overseer Talleyrand-Perigord!  These shall act as miraculous thunder-rod,—­to such length as they can.  O ye deep azure Heavens, and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing; deciduous Forests that die and are born again, continually, like the sons of men; stone Mountains that die daily with every rain-shower, yet are not dead and levelled for ages of ages, nor born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam half way to the Moon; O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwellingplace of the unnamed; O spirit, lastly, of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see,—­is not there a miracle:  That some French mortal should, we say not have believed, but pretended to imagine that he believed that Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!

Here, however, we are to remark with the sorrowing Historians of that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled, with mitre and tricolor belt, was yet but hitching up the Altar-steps, to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there descended a very deluge of rain.  Sad to see!  The thirty-staired Seats, all round our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set:  our antique Cassolettes become Water-pots; their incense-smoke gone hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapour.  Alas, instead of vivats, there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling.  From three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they have a skin; happily impervious.  The General’s sash runs water:  how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin-banners!  Worse, far worse, these hundred thousand, such is the Historian’s testimony, of the fairest of France!  Their snowy muslins all splashed and draggled; the ostrich feather shrunk shamefully to the backbone of a feather:  all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten into its original pap:  Beauty no longer swims decorated in her garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for