Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
By great good fortune, they had planted their artillery so well, that I
was fired up through my hole again, and alighted in my own garden, just
a little singed. My first thought was to run to an adjoining bed of
vegetable marrows. Thirty vegetable marrows and two pumpkins I rained
down to astonish the Skitzlanders, and I fervently hope that one of them
may have knocked out the remaining eye of my vindictive enemy, the
baron. I then went into the pantry, and obtained a basket full of eggs,
and having rained these down upon the Skitzlanders, I left them.
It was after breakfast when I went down to Skitzland, and I came back
while the dinner bell was ringing.
[From the People's Journal.]
CHARLOTTE CORDAY.
Perhaps the event that lingers longest in the memory, among all the
appalling episodes and startling passages of the French Revolution, is
the assassination of the tyrant Marat, by Charlotte Corday. With the
blood of old Corneille running in her veins, and possessing something of
his stern and masculine love of liberty, this simple child of nature
hears in her distant home that her friends, the Girondists, are
proscribed, and that a hated triumvirate in Paris, tramples on the
feelings and liberties of the people. Full of one idea, she purchases a
knife, and, without a single confidant, sets out for the metropolis,
where, procuring an interview with Marat, she stabs him to the heart,
and with one blow accomplishes her revenge, and what she vainly supposed
to be the people's redemption.
In Miss Julia Kavanagh's charming volumes she gives us a pretty faithful
memoir of this extraordinary woman. Among the women of the French
Revolution, there is one, says the gifted authoress, who stands
essentially apart: a solitary episode of the eventful story. She appears
for a moment, performs a deed--heroic as to the intention, criminal as
to the means--and disappears forever; lost in the shadow of time--an
unfathomed mystery.
The greatest portion of the youth of Charlotte Corday--to give her the
name by which she is generally known--was spent in the calm obscurity of
her convent solitude. Many high visions, many burning dreams and lofty
aspirations, already haunted her imaginative and enthusiastic mind, as
she slowly paced the silent cloisters, or rested, lost in thought,
beneath the shadow of the ancient elms. It is said that, like Madame
Roland, she contemplated secluding herself for ever from the world in
her monastic retreat; but, affected by the skepticism of the age, which
penetrated even beyond convent walls, she gave up the project....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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