private patriotic Clockmaker's apartment; no longer measuring hours of
mere heaviness. Vanished is the Bastille, what we call vanished:
the body, or sandstones, of it hanging, in benign metamorphosis, for
centuries to come, over the Seine waters, as Pont Louis Seize; (Dulaure:
Histoire de Paris, viii. 434.) the soul of it living, perhaps still
longer, in the memories of men.

So far, ye august Senators, with your Tennis-Court Oaths, your inertia
and impetus, your sagacity and pertinacity, have ye brought us. "And
yet think, Messieurs," as the Petitioner justly urged, "you who were our
saviours, did yourselves need saviours,"--the brave Bastillers, namely;
workmen of Paris; many of them in straightened pecuniary circumstances!
(Moniteur: Seance du Samedi 18 Juillet 1789 in Histoire Parlementaire,
ii. 137.) Subscriptions are opened; Lists are formed, more accurate than
Elie's; harangues are delivered. A Body of Bastille Heroes, tolerably
complete, did get together;--comparable to the Argonauts; hoping to
endure like them. But in little more than a year, the whirlpool
of things threw them asunder again, and they sank. So many highest
superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle
into comparatives and positives! The Siege of the Bastille, weighed with
which, in the Historical balance, most other sieges, including that
of Troy Town, are gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally
wounded, on the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons: on the
part of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping,
and deluge of musketry, One poor solitary invalid, shot stone-dead
(roide-mort) on the battlements; (Dusaulx: Prise de la Bastille, p. 447,
&c.) The Bastille Fortress, like the City of Jericho, was overturned by
miraculous sound.