Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/45

 dreamy eyes sprang flowers that seemed everlasting. Here life was one thing with light; here, under the thickening foliage in April, walked his mother, whom he held by the skirt of her gown." Here the crowding flowers "seemed to laugh as they warmed themselves in the sun, and himself also was a flower, being a child."

After five months of siege comes a month of mourning, and after the general agony an individual anguish. Before this we are silent; only there rises once more in our ears the unforgotten music of the fourth book of the "Contemplations," and holds us dumb in reverence before the renewal of that august and awful sorrow.

Then come the two most terrible months of the whole hideous year; the strange vision of that Commune in which heroes were jostled by ruffians, and martyrs fell side by side with murderers; the monstrous figure of that Assembly on whose head lies all the weight of the blood shed on either side, within the city as without; the spectral unspeakable aspect of that fratricidal agony, as of some Dantesque wrestle between devils and lost souls in hell. Against the madness of the besieged as against the atrocity of the besiegers the voice of the greatest among Frenchmen was lifted up in vain. In vain he prophesied, when first a threat of murder was put forth against the hostages, of the murderous reprisals which a crime so senseless and so shameless must assuredly provoke. In vain he reclaimed for Paris, in the face of Versailles, the right of municipal self-government by her own council; in vain rebuked the untimely and inopportune haste of Paris to revindicate this right for herself in a season of such unexampled calamity and peril. On the