The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, February 1883: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture.; Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
History
The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, February 1883: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture.; Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
The place of meeting of the National Assembly is in the former theater
of the palace, and if one is so fortunate as to have a friend among the
deputies, there is no difficulty in securing admission to any session.
Ordinarily, guests are shown to boxes, from which they can look down
upon the seven hundred representative men of France. The President’s
seat is at one end of the hall, with before him a tribune, or platform,
from which the deputies speak. On the right of the speaker are the
Royalists, including Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperialists, and on
the left the Republicans. Besides these two grand divisions, there are
the minor divisions of the Right and Left Center, the former wishing a
constitutional monarchy, and the latter a conservative republic. One
should visit the Assembly more than once to bring away anything beyond
a confused sense of much animated gesticulation, violent discussion,
often rising into a frenzy of speech and movement only equalled by the
excitement of the Bourse. Calm talk grows to an apparent tempest of
speech, for which there is no control, until it subsides of itself.
Those familiar with emotional French manner will tell us that it
all means nothing serious; that, notwithstanding this turmoil, all
important questions are calmly discussed in party councils before they
are submitted to public debate, and that the excitement is only the
natural outlet of irrepressible human nature as it exists in sunny
France. And it matters little with what petty bluster or serious
throes she does it, if, out of her agitations, the nation comes, as
she seems to be slowly doing, into larger light and truer liberty,
into the grand freedom of self-control. Once there, revolutions will
cease to be chronic, and regeneration, begun in the governmental
center, may permeate the spiritual and intellectual, and ultimately
reach even the corruption of the social life. Any influence that tends
toward this, however convulsive in its action, must be welcomed by the
thinking world. In her transformed palaces and half deserted churches
one can but think on these things, forgetting that our business is
for the present to observe and not to think. There is small time
now for processes of thought, and none for opinions or conclusions.
Three-quarters of the globe is before us, and even bewildering,
bewitching France must be left behind.
[To be continued.]
“WE MUST NOT FORGET OUR DEAD.”
By MARY R. D. DINGWALL.
“So many of our students are in middle and after middle
life; the death rate is, therefore, unusually large.”
“I will have them be with me where I am,”
Says Christ of his sainted ones;
And we give them up with sorrowing hearts,
When the Master’s summons comes.
Fold we the hands, though tasks at which they wrought
May be but half completed;
And we press the lips with a solemn thought
Of the last words they repeated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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