NAPOLEON'S TELEGRAPH ON MONTMARTRE.
"In my ramblings round Paris during the days of Napoleon, my steps always turned, at the beginning or end of my ramble, towards Montmartre, and my eyes always to the Telegraph upon its summit. I constantly found a number of people lingering there; watching, like myself, the movements of the machine which had sent out so many awful messages in its time. It was, of course, especially busy during the foreign campaigns of the great King-warrior. Its perfect stillness, until it began its communications; and then its sudden, various, and eccentric movements, of which no cause could be discovered, and whose purpose was a secret of state; made it to me, and to thousands of others, the most singular, and perhaps the most anxious of all contemplations, at a period when every act of the Government shook Europe."—MS. Journal.
I see thee standing on thy height,
A form of mystery and might,
Thou strange, uncouth, and shapeless thing,
Tossing thy arms with sullen swing,
Like the bare pinion of some monstrous bird,
Or skeleton, by its old spirit stirr'd.
Now to thy long lank sides they fall,
And thou art but a pillar tall,
Standing against the deep blue sky;
Then, in an instant, out they fly,
Making orb, triangle, thin curve, and square,
A thousand mad caprices on the air.
And wast thou but a toy of state?
Thou wast an oracle—a fate!
In thy deep silence was a voice.
And well might all earth's kings rejoice,
Thou lone, wild herald of earth's wildest will,
In the glad hour, when thou, at last, wert still.
All eyes upon thy tossings gated,
Asking what city bled or blazed?
All conscious that thy mystic freight
Was fierce ambition, tyrant hate,
Darting like flashes from one fiery throne;
The secret seen by all, by all unknown!
Round the wide world that mandate shot,
Embodied thought, and swift as thought—
From frozen Pole to burning Line,
The whole vast realm of ruin thine—
Death sweeping over sea and mount and plain;
Wherever man could slay, or man be slain.
I saw thee once—The eve was wild,
The snow was on the vineyard piled.
The forest bent before the gale;
And thou, amid the twilight pale,
Towering above thy mountain's misty spine,
Didst stand, like some old lightning-blasted pine.
But evil instinct seem'd to fill
Thy ghastly form. With sudden thrill
I saw thee fling thine arms on high,
As if in challenge to the sky.
Ay, all its tempests, all its fires were tame
To thy fierce flight—thy words of more than flame!
