But better than digging personally with acclaim, see Danton enter;—­the black brows clouded, the colossus-figure tramping heavy; grim energy looking from all features of the rugged man!  Strong is that grim Son of France, and Son of Earth; a Reality and not a Formula he too; and surely now if ever, being hurled low enough, it is on the Earth and on Realities that he rests.  “Legislators!” so speaks the stentor-voice, as the Newspapers yet preserve it for us, “it is not the alarm-cannon that you hear:  it is the pas-de-charge against our enemies.  To conquer them, to hurl them back, what do we require?  Il nous faut de l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace, To dare, and again to dare, and without end to dare!” (Moniteur in Hist.  Parl. xvii. 347.)—­Right so, thou brawny Titan; there is nothing left for thee but that.  Old men, who heard it, will still tell you how the reverberating voice made all hearts swell, in that moment; and braced them to the sticking-place; and thrilled abroad over France, like electric virtue, as a word spoken in season.

But the Commune, enrolling in the Champ-de-Mars?  But the Committee of Watchfulness, become now Committee of Public Salvation; whose conscience is Marat?  The Commune enrolling enrolls many; provides Tents for them in that Mars’-Field, that they may march with dawn on the morrow:  praise to this part of the Commune!  To Marat and the Committee of Watchfulness not praise;—­not even blame, such as could be meted out in these insufficient dialects of ours; expressive silence rather!  Lone Marat, the man forbid, meditating long in his Cellars of refuge, on his Stylites Pillar, could see salvation in one thing only:  in the fall of ‘two hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads.’  With so many score of Naples Bravoes, each a dirk in his right-hand, a muff on his left, he would traverse France, and do it.  But the world laughed, mocking the severe-benevolence of a People’s-Friend; and his idea could not become an action, but only a fixed-idea.  Lo, now, however, he has come down from his Stylites Pillar, to a Tribune particuliere; here now, without the dirks, without the muffs at least, were it not grown possible,—­now in the knot of the crisis, when salvation or destruction hangs in the hour!

The Ice-Tower of Avignon was noised of sufficiently, and lives in all memories; but the authors were not punished:  nay we saw Jourdan Coupe-tete, borne on men’s shoulders, like a copper Portent, ’traversing the cities of the South.’—­What phantasms, squalid-horrid, shaking their dirk and muff, may dance through the brain of a Marat, in this dizzy pealing of tocsin-miserere, and universal frenzy, seek not to guess, O Reader!  Nor what the cruel Billaud ’in his short brown coat was thinking;’ nor Sergent, not yet Agate-Sergent; nor Panis the confident of Danton;—­nor, in a word, how gloomy Orcus does breed in her gloomy womb, and fashion her monsters, and prodigies of Events, which thou seest her visibly