ancient and modern.

Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another, perhaps
few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering than mobs.
Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating
with, the deepest deep of Nature. When so much goes grinning and
grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and under the stiff buckram no heart
can be felt beating, here once more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity
and Reality. Shudder at it; or even shriek over it, if thou must;
nevertheless consider it. Such a Complex of human Forces and
Individualities hurled forth, in their transcendental mood, to act and
react, on circumstances and on one another; to work out what it is in
them to work. The thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to
themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work, generating,
consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent, with what results it
will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity conjecture in vain.

'Man,' as has been written, 'is for ever interesting to man; nay
properly there is nothing else interesting.' In which light also, may we
not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome? Battles, in
these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible
developement of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die,
and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Battles ever since
Homer's time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be
worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome
bloody Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky
way, to sing:--and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one
Insurrection of Women?

A thought, or dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all night,