Time surely; and also Eternity.  Dim dusk of Time,—­or noon which will be dusk; and then there is night, and silence; and Time with all its sick noises is swallowed in the still sea.  Pity thy brother, O Son of Adam!  The angriest frothy jargon that he utters, is it not properly the whimpering of an infant which cannot speak what ails it, but is in distress clearly, in the inwards of it; and so must squall and whimper continually, till its Mother take it, and it get—­to sleep!

This Convention is not four days old, and the melodious Meliboean stanzas that shook down Royalty are still fresh in our ear, when there bursts out a new diapason,—­unhappily, of Discord, this time.  For speech has been made of a thing difficult to speak of well:  the September Massacres.  How deal with these September Massacres; with the Paris Commune that presided over them?  A Paris Commune hateful-terrible; before which the poor effete Legislative had to quail, and sit quiet.  And now if a young omnipotent Convention will not so quail and sit, what steps shall it take?  Have a Departmental Guard in its pay, answer the Girondins, and Friends of Order!  A Guard of National Volunteers, missioned from all the Eighty-three or Eighty-five Departments, for that express end; these will keep Septemberers, tumultuous Communes in a due state of submissiveness, the Convention in a due state of sovereignty.  So have the Friends of Order answered, sitting in Committee, and reporting; and even a Decree has been passed of the required tenour.  Nay certain Departments, as the Var or Marseilles, in mere expectation and assurance of a Decree, have their contingent of Volunteers already on march:  brave Marseillese, foremost on the Tenth of August, will not be hindmost here; ‘fathers gave their sons a musket and twenty-five louis,’ says Barbaroux, ‘and bade them march.’

Can any thing be properer?  A Republic that will found itself on justice must needs investigate September Massacres; a Convention calling itself National, ought it not to be guarded by a National force?—­Alas, Reader, it seems so to the eye:  and yet there is much to be said and argued.  Thou beholdest here the small beginning of a Controversy, which mere logic will not settle.  Two small well-springs, September, Departmental Guard, or rather at bottom they are but one and the same small well-spring; which will swell and widen into waters of bitterness; all manner of subsidiary streams and brooks of bitterness flowing in, from this side and that; till it become a wide river of bitterness, of rage and separation,—­which can subside only into the Catacombs.  This Departmental Guard, decreed by overwhelming majorities, and then repealed for peace’s sake, and not to insult Paris, is again decreed more than once; nay it is partially executed, and the very men that are to be of it are seen visibly parading the Paris streets,—­shouting once, being overtaken with liquor:  “A bas Marat, Down with Marat!” (Hist.  Parl. xx. 184.) Nevertheless, decreed never so often, it is repealed just as often; and continues, for some seven months, an angry noisy Hypothesis only:  a fair Possibility struggling to become a Reality, but which shall never be one; which, after endless struggling, shall, in February next, sink into sad rest,—­dragging much along with it.  So singular are the ways of men and honourable Members.