silence his awful mystery of hidden sound and utterance withheld; and the swarming of centipedes without number cannot take from Memnon, suddenly struck radiant, the great and terrible voice that makes answer to the sun. Those minute and multitudinous creatures who revile and defame the great—and thereby, says Blake, "blaspheme God, for there is no other God"—have no more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence against it have power to undo its work; their wrath and their mourning are in vain; the long festival of the ravenous night is over, the world of darkness is in the throes of death; the dreadful daylight has come; the flitter-mouse is blind, the polecat strays about squealing, the glowworm has lost his glory, the fox, alas, sheds tears; the beasts that used to go out hunting in the evening at the time when little birds go to sleep are at their last gasp; the desolation of the wolves fills the woods full of howling; the persecuted spectres know not what to do; if this goes on, if this light persists in dazzling and dismaying the night-hawk and the raven, the vampire will die of hunger in the grave; the pitiless sunbeam catches and consumes the dark.—It is to judge the crimes of the sunrise that these judges sit in session.

Meantime, amid all the alternations of troubled hope with horror and the travail of an age in labour that has not strength to bring forth, there are present things of comfort and reassurance. "The children we have always with us;" they are no more troubled about what we do than the bird that twitters beneath the hornbeam, or the star that breaks into flower of light on the black sky-