The rough draft of _Joan_ was hardly laid aside when Southey’s sympathies with the revolutionary movement in France, strained already to the utmost point of tension, were fatally rent. All his faith, all his hope, were given to the Girondin party; and from the Girondins he had singled out Brissot as his ideal of political courage, purity and wisdom. Brissot, like himself, was a disciple of Jean Jacques; his life was austere; he had suffered on behalf of freedom. On the day when the Bastille was stormed its keys were placed in Brissot’s hands; it was Brissot who had determined that war should be declared against the foreign foes of the Republic. But now the Girondins—following hard upon Marie Antoinette—were in the death-carts; they chanted their last hymn of liberty, ever growing fainter while the axe lopped head after head; and Brissot was among the martyrs (October 31, 1793). Probably no other public event so deeply affected Southey. “I am sick of the world,” he writes, “and discontented with every one in it. The murder of Brissot has completely harrowed up my faculties.... I look round the world, and everywhere find the same spectacle—the strong tyrannizing over the weak, man and beast.... There is no place for virtue.” After this, though Southey did not lose faith in democratic principles, he averted his eyes for a time from France: how could he look to butchers who had shed blood which was the very life of liberty, for the realization of his dreams? And whither should he look? Had he but ten thousand republicans like himself, they might repeople Greece and expel the Turk. Being but one, might not Cowley’s fancy, a cottage in America, be transformed into a fact: “three rooms ... and my only companion some poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate?” Meanwhile he occupied a room in Aunt Tyler’s house, and, instead of swinging the axe in some forest primeval, amused himself with splitting a wedge of oak in company with Shad, who might, perhaps, serve for the emancipated negro. Moreover, he was very diligently driving his quill: “I have finished transcribing _Joan_, and have bound her in marble paper with green ribbons, and am now copying all my remainables to carry to Oxford. Then once more a clear field, and then another epic poem, and then another.” Appalling announcement! “I have accomplished a most arduous task, transcribing all my verses that appear worth the trouble, except letters. Of these I took one list—another of my pile of stuff and nonsense—and a third of what I have burnt and lost; upon an average 10,000 verses are burnt and lost; the same number preserved, and 15,000 worthless.” Such sad mechanic exercise dulled the ache in Southey’s heart; still “the visions of futurity,” he finds, “are dark and gloomy, and the only ray that enlivens the scene beams on America.”