Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/57

1789–90] Chimeras, with your magnetic vellum; sweet young Chimera, adust middle-aged one! The Prison-doors are open. Hardly again shall ye preside the Rouen Chamber of Accounts; but vanish obscurely into Limbo.

dim masses, and specks of even deepest black, work in that white-hot glow of the French mind, now wholly in fusion and confusion. Old women here swearing their ten children on the new Evangel of Jean Jacques; old women there looking up for Favras' Heads in the celestial Luminary: these are preternatural signs, prefiguring somewhat.

In fact, to the Patriot children of Hope themselves it is undeniable that difficulties exist: emigrating Seigneurs; Parlements in sneaking but most malicious mutiny (though the rope is round their neck); above all, the most decided 'deficiency of grains.' Sorrowful; but, to a Nation that hopes, not irremediable. To a Nation which is in fusion and ardent communion of thought; which, for example, on signal of one Fugleman, will lift its right-hand like a drilled regiment, and swear and illuminate, till every village from Ardennes to the Pyrenees has rolled its village-drum, and sent up its little oath, and glimmer of tallow-illumination some fathoms into the reign of Night!

If grains are defective, the fault is not of Nature or National Assembly, but of Art and Anti-National Intriguers. Such malign individuals, of the scoundrel species, have power to vex us, while the Constitution is a-making. Endure it, ye heroic Patriots: nay rather, why not cure it? Grains do grow, they lie extant there in sheaf or sack; only that regraters and Royalist plotters, to provoke the People into