No miraculous Klaus or Epimenides sleeps in these times:  and yet, may not many a man, if of due opacity and levity, act the same miracle in a natural way; we mean, with his eyes open?  Eyes has he, but he sees not, except what is under his nose.  With a sparkling briskness of glance, as if he not only saw but saw through, such a one goes whisking, assiduous, in his circle of officialities; not dreaming but that it is the whole world:  as, indeed, where your vision terminates, does not inanity begin there, and the world’s end clearly declares itself—­to you?  Whereby our brisk sparkling assiduous official person (call him, for instance, Lafayette), suddenly startled, after year and day, by huge grape-shot tumult, stares not less astonished at it than Peter Klaus would have done.  Such natural-miracle Lafayette can perform; and indeed not he only but most other officials, non-officials, and generally the whole French People can perform it; and do bounce up, ever and anon, like amazed Seven-sleepers awakening; awakening amazed at the noise they themselves make.  So strangely is Freedom, as we say, environed in Necessity; such a singular Somnambulism, of Conscious and Unconscious, of Voluntary and Involuntary, is this life of man.  If any where in the world there was astonishment that the Federation Oath went into grape-shot, surely of all persons the French, first swearers and then shooters, felt astonished the most.

Alas, offences must come.  The sublime Feast of Pikes, with its effulgence of brotherly love, unknown since the Age of Gold, has changed nothing.  That prurient heat in Twenty-five millions of hearts is not cooled thereby; but is still hot, nay hotter.  Lift off the pressure of command from so many millions; all pressure or binding rule, except such melodramatic Federation Oath as they have bound themselves with!  For ‘Thou shalt’ was from of old the condition of man’s being, and his weal and blessedness was in obeying that.  Wo for him when, were it on hest of the clearest necessity, rebellion, disloyal isolation, and mere ’I will’, becomes his rule!  But the Gospel of Jean-Jacques has come, and the first Sacrament of it has been celebrated:  all things, as we say, are got into hot and hotter prurience; and must go on pruriently fermenting, in continual change noted or unnoted.

‘Worn out with disgusts,’ Captain after Captain, in Royalist moustachioes, mounts his warhorse, or his Rozinante war-garron, and rides minatory across the Rhine; till all have ridden.  Neither does civic Emigration cease:  Seigneur after Seigneur must, in like manner, ride or roll; impelled to it, and even compelled.  For the very Peasants despise him in that he dare not join his order and fight. (Dampmartin, passim.) Can he bear to have a Distaff, a Quenouille sent to him; say in copper-plate shadow, by post; or fixed up in wooden reality over his gate-lintel:  as if he were no Hercules but an Omphale?  Such scutcheon they forward to him diligently from behind