Page:The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Sheppard, 1883.djvu/129

 with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought with him for freedom and equality.… It is now sixty years since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Eights, the decalogue of the world's new creed, which was revealed to him amid the thunders and lightnings of cannon.… And the tricolored flag waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the Marseillaise! … It is all over with my yearning for repose. I now know again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do.… I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benediction.… Flowers! flowers! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the lyre too, reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song.… Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn up the palaces, and illuminate the huts.… Words like bright javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies.… I am all joy and song, all sword and flame! Perhaps, too, all delirium.… One of those sunbeams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain, and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extinguishes this Greek fire.… Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly, 'The poor people have won!' Yes; instinctively the people comprehend such events, perhaps, better than we, with all our means of knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue of the Battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly rushed into the room with the sorrowful cry, 'The nobles have won!' … This morning another packet of newspapers is come. I devour them like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor.… The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating but little of the food that was offered him—burying the greater part of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master!"

The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by imagination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact