To worthily fulfil this mission, the most important, perhaps, ever confided to a deliberative assembly, they must rise above all consideration of persons, all interests of parties, and they must choose, in the sincerity of their conscience, the man and the form of government that will most surely guarantee the restoration of the Christian principle, and the repudiation of the revolutionary, the destruction of anarchy and Cæsarism, the protection of every right, and the re-establishment of true liberty. This choice, which alone can save us, will not be difficult from the moment that they agree on the principle from which it must proceed, and the end which must be attained; and once the choice made under the eye of God, it will be still less difficult, with his help, to make it acceptable to France.
The Comte de Breda recently recalled to us, as appropriate to the time, the consoling and prophetic words written by Joseph de Maistre in 1797, at an epoch when the restoration of order appeared still more difficult than at the present time: “Can we believe that the political world moves by chance, and that it is not organized, directed, animated, by the same wisdom which shines in the physical? The great criminals who overthrow a state necessarily produce heart-rending wounds; but, when man works to re-establish order, he associates himself with the Author of order, he is favored by nature—that is to say, by the harmony of secondary causes, which are the ministers of divine power. His action has something in it of divine; it is at the same time gentle and imperious; he forces nothing, and nothing resists him.”
[GRAPES AND THORNS.]
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”
CHAPTER I.
CRICHTON, AND THE CRICHTONIANS.
The delicate exuberance of a New England spring was making amends for the rigor of a New England winter, and for its own tardy coming. Up through the faded sward pushed multitudinously all the little budding progeny of nature; out through rough bark burst the tender foliage; and all the green was golden-green. Light winds blew hither and thither; light clouds chased each other over the sky, now and then massing their forces to send a shower down, the drops so entangled with sunshine as to look like a rain of diamonds. Birds soared joyously, singing as they flew; and the channels of the brooks could scarcely contain their frolicsome streams. Sometimes a scattered sisterhood of snowflakes came down to see their ancestresses, and, finding them changed into snowdrops, immediately melted into an ecstasy, and so exhaled.
This vernal freshness made the beautiful city of Crichton fairer yet, with curtains waving from open windows, vines budding over the walls, and all the many trees growing alive. It set a fringe of grasses nodding over the edges of three yellow paths ravelled out from a new road that, when it had travelled about a mile westward from the city, gave up being a road for the present. One of these paths started off southward, and sank into a swamp. In summer, this swamp was as purple as a ripe plum with flower-de-luce, and those who loved nature well enough to search for her treasures could find there also an occasional cardinalflower, a pink arethusa, or a pitcherblossom full to the brim with the last shower, or the last dew-fall. The second path ran northward to the bank of the Cocheco River, and broke off on the top of a cliff. If you should have nerve enough to scramble down the face of this cliff, you would find there the most romantic little cave imaginable, moss-lined, and furnished with moss cushions to its rock divans. A wild cherry-tree had in some way managed to find footing just below the cave, and at this season it would push up a spray of bloom, in emulation of the watery spray beneath. Fine green vines threaded all the moss; and, if one of them were lifted, it would show a line of honey-sweet bell-flowers strung under its round leaves.