< Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf
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L'ANNÉE TERRIBLE.

33

neither bread nor light, corporeal nurture nor intellectual; upon the slaughtered and the banished, the hideous pits of quicklime into which the yet warm corpses of men and women were huddled, and the more hideous ships of transport between whose decks were huddled the living agonies of those condemned to the sufferings over which in the first years of the fallen empire men shuddered or wept, thinking of the innocent as well as the guilty lives crushed and worn out in that penal passage, killed by cold and heat and foul wretchedness—stifled in dens too low to stand upright in, with the sense overhead of the moving mass of the huge hurrying ship on its intolerable way; upon all these multitudinous miseries of all who do and suffer wrong, the single voice of charity and of reason invokes the equal dole and due of pity. At Vianden, amid all the sounds and shows of summer, the banished poet broods on the bloody problem that is not to be solved by file-firing and massacre at haphazard; all the light of the June days is reflected in his verse, but in his soul there is no reflection but of graves dug in the street for men shot down without trial, of murder feeling its way in the dark at random, and victims dispatched by chance instead of choice. With the intense and subtle beauty of this June landscape, where the witness could see no sympathy with the human trouble of the time, we may compare that former picture of the grim glory of a November sky after sunset, seen from the invested walls of Paris, when heaven did seem in harmony with the time, and the watcher saw there a reflection of war and mourning, from the west as white as a shroud to the east as black as a pall and alon_ the line of

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