These wheelings and movements in the region of the Argonne, which are all faithfully described by Dumouriez himself, and more interesting to us than Hoyle’s or Philidor’s best Game of Chess, let us, nevertheless, O Reader, entirely omit;—­and hasten to remark two things:  the first a minute private, the second a large public thing.  Our minute private thing is:  the presence, in the Prussian host, in that war-game of the Argonne, of a certain Man, belonging to the sort called Immortal; who, in days since then, is becoming visible more and more, in that character, as the Transitory more and more vanishes; for from of old it was remarked that when the Gods appear among men, it is seldom in recognisable shape; thus Admetus’ neatherds give Apollo a draught of their goatskin whey-bottle (well if they do not give him strokes with their ox-rungs), not dreaming that he is the Sungod!  This man’s name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  He is Herzog Weimar’s Minister, come with the small contingent of Weimar; to do insignificant unmilitary duty here; very irrecognizable to nearly all!  He stands at present, with drawn bridle, on the height near Saint-Menehould, making an experiment on the ‘cannon-fever;’ having ridden thither against persuasion, into the dance and firing of the cannon-balls, with a scientific desire to understand what that same cannon-fever may be:  ‘The sound of them,’ says he, ’is curious enough; as if it were compounded of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water and the whistle of birds.  By degrees you get a very uncommon sensation; which can only be described by similitude.  It seems as if you were in some place extremely hot, and at the same time were completely penetrated by the heat of it; so that you feel as if you and this element you are in were perfectly on a par.  The eyesight loses nothing of its strength or distinctness; and yet it is as if all things had got a kind of brown-red colour, which makes the situation and the objects still more impressive on you.’ (Goethe, Campagne in Frankreich, Werke, xxx. 73.)

This is the cannon-fever, as a World-Poet feels it.—­A man entirely irrecognisable!  In whose irrecognisable head, meanwhile, there verily is the spiritual counterpart (and call it complement) of this same huge Death-Birth of the World; which now effectuates itself, outwardly in the Argonne, in such cannon-thunder; inwardly, in the irrecognisable head, quite otherwise than by thunder!  Mark that man, O Reader, as the memorablest of all the memorable in this Argonne Campaign.  What we say of him is not dream, nor flourish of rhetoric; but scientific historic fact; as many men, now at this distance, see or begin to see.