Up, then up! When day's at rest,
'Tis time that such as we are watchers;
Rise to judgment, brethren, rise!
Vengeance knows not sleepy eyes,
He and night are matchers.


The nature of the verses soon led Philipson to comprehend that he was
in presence of the Initiated, or the Wise Wen; names which were
applied to the celebrated judges of the Secret Tribunal, which
continued at that period to subsist in Swabia, Franconia, and other
districts of the east of Germany, which was called, perhaps from the
frightful and frequent occurrence of executions by command of those
invisible judges, the Red Land. Philipson had often heard that the
seat of a Free Count, or chief of the Secret Tribunal, was secretly
instituted even on the left bank of the Rhine, and that it maintained
itself in Alsace, with the usual tenacity of those secret societies,
though Duke Charles of Burgundy had expressed a desire to discover and
to discourage its influence so far as was possible, without exposing
himself to danger from the thousands of poniards which that mysterious
tribunal could put in activity against his own life;--an awful means
of defence, which for a long time rendered it extremely hazardous for
the sovereigns of Germany, and even the emperors themselves, to put
down by authority those singular associations.

* * * * *

He lay devising the best means of obviating the present danger, while
the persons whom he beheld glimmered before him, less like distinct