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L'ANNÉE TERRIBLE.

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conquerors to be marked out for such especial notice as an act of this singular and admirable baseness. From all unclean things, from the mouths of the priesthood and the press, from the tongues that lap blood and the throats that vomit falsehood, rose the cry of mockery and hatred; if the preacher of peace and righteousness, the counsellor of justice and of mercy, were not a madman, he would be a ruffian; but the punctilious equity of episcopal journals gave him the benefit of the doubt. Vet for all this, as the poet found on leaving Brussels, it is not everybody who can impose the doom of exile; to expulsion the foreigner may condemn you, to exile he cannot. Exile is from the fatherland alone; a man's own country is the only one terrible to him who is cast out from it. In words full of the beauty of a divine sorrow the exile of many years has set down the difference.

From Vianden as from Brussels he continued to fulfil the duty of intercessor; to plead for the incendiary who could not read, for the terrible and pitiable woman dragged in triumph through the laughing and raging throngs of Versailles, dumb and bleeding, with foam-flecked lips fast locked in bitterness of silence, in savage deafness that nothing can move or shake, with the look as of one "aweary of the sun," with a kind of fierce affright in her eyes. For all such his appeal is made to their slayers on the old sacred plea, "Forgive them; for they know not what they do." Their wretchedness and their ignorance, their great want and their little knowledge, left them conscious of all that they suffered, unconscious of all that they did.

Out of the darkness of these most tragic poems of all,

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