How much of its strength, which was of the imagination merely, has fled Rascality having looked plainly in the King’s face, and not died! When the assembled crows can pluck up their scarecrow, and say to it, Here shalt thou stand and not there and can treat with it, and make it, from an infinite, a quite finite Constitutional scarecrow,-what is to be looked for? Not in the finite Constitutional scarecrow, but in what still unmeasured, infinite-seeming force may rally round it, is there thenceforth any hope. Royalty was beforehand so decrepit, moribund, there is little life in it to heal an injury. Was French Royalty, when wrenched forth from its tapestries in that fashion, on that Sixth of October 1789, such a victim? Universal France, and Royal Proclamation to all the Provinces, answers anxiously, No. There is small interest now in watching his long low moans: notable only are his sharper agonies, what convulsive struggles he may take to cast the torture off from him and then finally the last departure of life itself, and how he lies extinct and ended, either wrapt like CÆsar in decorous mantle-folds, or unseemly sunk together, like one that had not the force even to die.
The victim having once got his stroke-of-grace, the catastrophe can be considered as almost come. Ist vielleicht nur die Welt ein grosser Kerker? Und frei ist Wohl der Tolle, der sich Ketten zu KrÄnzen erkiest? Mauern seh ich’ gestÜrzt, und Mauern seh’ ich errichtet Hier Gefangene, dort auch der Gefangenen viel.
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