do about it?" at last she said. 66 "Do about it?" answered the old man. They'll pay the bonds in gold, of course.” It was this sturdy integrity of the common people, which no sophistry could delude, and no base appeal to self-interest could shake, that swept the Devil behind its back and held the Government to the letter of its bond. It has long been the fashion of some to sneer at the wisdom of the people. Mr. Matthew Arnold has of late deprecated the influence among us of what he terms the "numbers." He builds his hope for our future upon the rule of the elect remnant that may still exist. Carlyle crammed his contempt into the phrase, "A certain people, once upon a time, voted, by overwhelming majority, 'Not this man, but Barabbas.'" Nevertheless, our national history is one long testimony to the general trustworthiness of the common people; and when that ceases to be the fact, the nation will soon cease to be. HENRY A. STIMSON. TRUE REFORMERS. To the rightly constituted mind, to the truly developed man, there always is, there always must be, opportunity : opportunity to be and to learn, nobly to do and to endure; and what matter whether with pomp and sound of trumpets and shout of applauding thousands, or in silence and seclusion, beneath the calm, discerning gaze of Heaven? No station can be humble on which that gaze is approvingly bent; no work can be ignoble which is performed uprightly, and not impelled by sordid and selfish aims. Not from among the children of monarchs, ushered into being with boom of cannon, and shouts of reveling millions, but from amid the sons of obscurity and toil, cradled in peril and ignominy, from the bulrushes and the manger, come forth the benefactors and saviors of mankind. So, when all the babble and glare of our age shall have passed TRUE REFORMERS. 75 into a fitting oblivion; when those who have enjoyed rare opportunities, and swayed vast empires, and been borne through life on the shoulders of shouting multitudes, shall have been laid at last to rest in golden coffins, to molder forgotten, the stately marble their only monuments, it will be found that some humble youth, who neither inherited nor found, but hewed out his opportunities, has uttered the thought which shall render the age memorable, by extending the means of enlightenment and blessing to our race. The great struggle for human progress and elevation proceeds noiselessly, often unnoted, often checked, and apparently baffled. In that struggle, maintained by the wise and good of all parties, all creeds, all climes, bear ye the part of men. Heed the lofty summons, and, with souls serene and constant, prepare to tread boldly in the path of highest duty. So shall life be to you truly exalted and heroic; so shall death be a transition neither sought nor dreaded; so shall your memory, though cherished at first but by a few humble, loving hearts, linger long and gratefully in human remembrance, a watchword to the truthful, and an incitement to generous endeavor, freshened by the proud tears of admiring affection, and fragrant with the odors of heaven! We need a loftier ideal to nerve us for heroic lives. To know and feel our nothingness, without regretting it; to deem fame, riches, personal happiness, but shadows, of which human good is the substance; to welcome pain, privation, ignominy, so that the sphere of human knowledge, the empire of virtue, be thereby extended-such is the soul's temper in which the heroes of the coming age shall be When the stately monuments of mightiest conquerors shall have become shapeless and forgotten ruins, the humble graves of earth's Howards and Frys shall still be freshened by the tears of fondly admiring millions, and the proudest epitaph shall be the simple entreaty, "Write me as one who loved his fellow-men." HORACE GREELEY. ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH OF DANTON. (Abridged.) Note 30. WHEN Danton, hastily summoned by Camille, returned to Paris, friends trembling at the result of a quarrel between him and Robespierre, brought them to meet. "It is right," said Danton, swallowing much indignation, "to repress the Royalists; but we should not strike except where it is useful to the Republic; we should not confound the innocent and the guilty." "And who told you," replied Robespierre, with a poisonous look, "that one innocent person had perished?" "What?" said Danton, turning round to juryman Fabricius; "What, not one innocent? What say you of it, Fabricius?" Friends of Danton urged him to fly. His wife urged him. "Whither fly?" answered he. "If freed France cast me out, there are only dungeons for me elsewhere! One does not carry his country with him at the sole of his shoe." The man Danton sat still. On the night of the 30th of March, juryman Fabricius came rushing in, haste looking through his eyes. A clerk of the Committee has told him Danton is to be arrested this very night. "They dare not!" replies Danton; and murmuring, "They dare not!" he goes to sleep as usual. And yet, on the morrow morning, strange rumor spreads over Paris city. Danton and Camille are both arrested! The Convention clusters itself into groups, wide-eyed, whispering, "Danton arrested!" Who, then, is safe? He had but three days to lie in prison. "What is your name?-place of abode?" and the like, Tinville asks him, when brought to the bar, according to formality. "My name is Danton,” answers he, "a name tolerably known in the Revolution. My abode will soon be Annihilation; but I shall live in the Pantheon of History!" Some five months ago, the trial of the twenty-two Girondists was the greatest that Tinville had then done; but here ARREST, TRIAL, AND DEATH OF DANTON. 77 is a still greater to do, a thing which makes the very heart of him waver. For it is the voice of Danton, which now reverberates from these domes; in passionate words, piercing in their wild sincerity, winged with wrath. He raises his huge stature; he shakes his huge black head, fire flashes from the eyes of him, piercing to all Republican hearts; so that the very galleries, though filled by ticket, murmur sympathy. "Danton hidden on the 10th of August?" reverberates he, with the roar of a lion in the toils. "Where are the men who had to press Danton to show himself that day? Where are these high-gifted souls of whom I borrowed energy? Let them appear, these accusers of mine. I have all the clearness of self-possession when I demand them. I will unmask the three shallow scoundrels, who fawn on Robespierre, and lead him toward his destruction! Let them produce themselves here. I will plunge them into nothingness, out of which they ought never to have risen!" The agitated President agitates his bell; enjoins calmness, in a vehement manner. "What is it to thee how I defend myself?" cries the other; "the right of dooming me is thine always; the voice of a man speaking for his honor and his life may well drown the jingling of thy bell!" Danton carried a high look in the death cart, carnivorous rabble howling round, palpable, and yet incredible, like a madman's dream. "Calm, my friend," said he to Camille, "heed not that vile canaille." At the foot of the scaffold he was heard to ejaculate: "Oh, my wife, my well beloved, I shall never see thee more, then!"—but interrupting himself: "Danton, no weakness!" "Thou wilt show my head to the people!" said he to the headsman; "it is worth showing!" So passed, like a gigantic mass of valor, ostentation, fury, affection, and wild revolutionary force and manhood, this Danton, to his unknown home. He had many sins; but one worst sin he had not, that of cant. No hollow formalist, deceptive and self-deceptive, was this; but a very man. With all his dross, he was a man-fiery-real, from the great fire-bosom of nature herself. He saved France from Brunswick. He walked straight his own wild road, whither it led him. He may live some generations yet in the memory of men. THOMAS CARLYLE. THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. (By permission of Houghton & Mifflin.) THIS is the ship of pearl which, poets feign, The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purple wings In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare; Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell Where its dim-dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed: Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed. Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread the lustrous coil : Still as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining doorway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, |