Friends, the hour in which we live, and in which I speak to you, is a gloomy hour, but of such is the terrible price of the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. Oh! the human race shall be delivered, uplifted and consoled! We affirm it on this barricade. Whence shall arise the shout of love, if it be not from the summit of sacrifice? O my brothers, here is the place of junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving-stones, nor of timbers, nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Misery here encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with thee and thou shalt be born again with me. From the pressure of all desolations faith gushes forth. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are to mingle and compose our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illumined by the dawn. Europe: The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States BY WALT WHITMAN (The European revolutions of 1848-49) Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves, Like lightning it le'pt forth half startled at itself, Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings. O hope and faith! O aching close of exiled patriots' lives! O many a sicken'd heart! Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh. And you, paid to defile the People! you liars, mark! Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts, For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his simplicity the poor man's wages, For many a promise sworn by royal lips, and broken, and laugh'd at in the breaking, Then in their power, not for all these, did the blows strike revenge, or the heads of the nobles fall; The People scorn'd the ferocity of kings. But the sweetness of mercy brew'd bitter destruction, and the frighten'd monarchs come back; Each comes in state, with his train--hangman, priest, tax-gatherer, Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant. Yet behind all, lowering, stealing--lo, a Shape, Vague as the night, draped interminable, head, front, and form, in scarlet folds, Whose face and eyes none may see, Out of its robes only this--the red robes, lifted by the arm, One finger, crook'd, pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears. Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves--bloody corpses of young men; The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud, And all these things bear fruits--and they are good. Those corpses of young men, Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets--those hearts pierc'd by the gray lead, Cold and motionless as they seem, live elsewhere with unslaughter'd vitality.