This in part is the picture of Paris immediately following the July Revolution. A compromise king at its head who had not yet shown himself to the people and who had no definite internal policy, a divided ministry, a mutilated, weakened legislative and a population torn between the support of the vested interests and the reluctant acceptance of the Hôtel de Ville and the desires of Bonapartists, Legitimists and the Clubs. A definite policy even of repression might have averted many of the dangers and the final disaster that came. But the month of August set the seal of Fate upon the policy of the July favorite and his unhappy family. The disintegrating and disorganizing elements of France were allowed to survive, and their survival accounts in part for the stormy years and final catastrophe that Cavaignac had foreseen eighteen years earlier.
NOVEMBER FOG ON A LANCASHIRE MOOR
(AN IMPRESSION IN OUTLINE)
Beneath the outraged clouds, this moor has wept
Since noon-in yellow and unlovely mist-
Over blank desolation; for even here
Redoubled winter lowers. Those vomiting shafts
Again make dark the drabbled wilderness
Where I have seen, sometimes, lost summer hiding
Half-shamed, on holidays, when cleansing wind
Persuaded the bedstraw and the ling to bloom,
And set lone harebells fluttering in the grass.
Then I was glad, if only for an hour;
But now, when needles of this tainted rain
Pierce into a mind that is not yet a waste,
My heart is bitter and will not be cheered.
The blue flowers and the white are dead, that laughed
Awhile at smoke, when August's fiery breath
Inspired this desert to forget a grief
That never passes. Little, purple songs
That summer wrote upon the sandy ground,
And the bees chanted, have been blotted out,
Even as rainbowed dreams that once I dreamt,
When I was primed with hope and pride in life.
The land is in mourning. From that once green vale
Comes up-as from a hushed volcano's mouth-
As tinging reek: from this my fancy shapes
Sad, wandering spirits of the purblind men
Whose grimed memorials slant in hideous clay
Shunned by all herbage,-souls of greedy folk
Who shamed their meadows, woods and harvest-lands
With refuse, and with foulness made their brooks
Run black, and hung dark curtains in the sky.
I think of those who prematurely passed
Death's gateway, victims of the very poisons
Themselves distilled, and feel that they are near!
For even as a timid child suspects
At night some shadowy shape, thus I devise
The presence of imaginary things.
Unquiet and invisible forms, that move
In screening vapor, seem to touch my face
With fingers cold as midnight icicles:
Sad souls are these; but, haply, they are now
Less grieved because the sullen day has hid
Their handiwork; and the accusing wastes,
Once pastures and cornfields, are thus lost in mist,-
Because the sky, which Man may not destroy,
Effaces awhile the ruin that they made.
Miserable this mirk; but, in that sooty vale,
Gloom becomes horror, doubly tenebrous!
Perhaps to get a little nearer heaven,
Such phantoms seek this upland solitude:
For at midnoon none might have read the words
Upon their tombstones, which proclaim them saints
In the bleak garths that hold no buried sinners.
Deluded by the fog, a lonely bird
Has made their endless grief articulate :
Stabbing the mist with one insistent note
Of startling, plaintive shrillness, it disturbs
The hush which dead men maybe strive to break.
If, veritably, a disembodied folk
Could haunt this moor, what misery were theirs! The birthrights which their bondswomen forewent They would remember, and the privileges
Surrendered by their men-slaves, and the deaths
Of sickly babes who never knew delight.
Well might they be disconsolate-those who stripped
Their lands of beauty, to make monstrous altars
Unto a ruthless god; and lit great fires
Thereon, from which the dark thank-offerings
Spewed a continual insult in the face
Of the Creator of the woods and fields!
The ghostly light is failing; sickly gorse,
Rusty and soot-encrusted, drips despair.
Like to an old and dying laborer,
Who gasps for breath below, in that black vale,—
Deserted by his kindred-this poor tree
Confronts me. Many springs have tried to make
Its branches glad with blossom, but in vain:
Now, overpowered by dark vicissitudes,
Pathetic in its utter loneliness,
The last survivor of a poisoned wood
Strives in the mist to hide its cankered shame.
Where nature's protest fills the heart with shame,
My forefathers, who live in me, revolt
At such a desecration of bright things.
I feel the silent loathing and the censure
Of the plague-struck earth; the deep and withering scorn
Of skies obscured; the wrath of sullied winds;
The anger of waters scummed with bitterness.
Do these preventable horrors testify
To human greatness? Man is only great
When joy, as tenant, holds a moiety
Of the receptive mind that welcomes it;
And happiness may only move such mind
When active mid the things that make for joy.
Here, in an overawing quietude,
With shrinking nerves and frozen heart, I face
The insulted earth and sky, and ask of them
Forgiveness for the errors of mankind.
If, blent with mine, are words from soundless lips
Of those whose follies greedier men transcend,
Such are most fitting to the sombre time:
Yet I hear nothing: silent is the moment
As the hushed ending of some tragedy.
But, in this twilight, a still voice repeats
Old maxims of the wise, who knew and said
That the first duty of all earthly creatures
Is to be worthy of life's glorious gifts—
To be strong and sane and noble in the sight
Of unseen eyes for ever vigilant.
A wiser generation saw from here
A land that lit bright visions in the mind:
No lovelier valley ever welcomed day
Than that which lies below me: it was richer
Than now it is, with all its blatant wealth,
When blest with pastoral simplicity.
Once, in a beautiful, forgotten peace,
Its spires were proud in unpolluted air;
Its gardens nourished tender-petalled flowers,
And there was lustre in its people's eyes
Betokening health and quiet happiness.
But now, where beauty was not shy of old,
Lives are misspent in hideous desolation:
Great chimneys of a hundred factories,
Ash-heaps and grassless fields and rotting trees
Border a river that is blue no more.
The blackened churches stand amid old tombs,
Past which, in daytime, sullen factory folk
Haste to their slighted labors, and by night
To such false joys as harm them more than toil.
To them Spring seems a dismal mockery,
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