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Not that I have ever kept a regular Journal, a matter which I now regret; but I have mingled a good deal in general life, I have seen nearly all the remarkable characters of Europe in the most stirring period of the world, and I have seen the beginning as well as the end of that most extraordinary of all national catastrophes, the French Revolution.
The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations.
How many things, how many plays that failed or were applauded, how many ruined families, how many incidents, how many adventures, how many catastrophes were summed up in this flower! To all those who lived upon the crowd that was nightly summoned here, what a spectre this flower would have been had it appeared to them two years ago!
Yet, in the midst of these catastrophes, swift as thought, one catches sometimes a momentary glimpse of a picture, rapid and fleeting, as if illumined by a flash of lightning.
Like the every-day life of men with its imperceptible attritions was the insensible growth and decay of things; as the tumult of his emotions were the storms and catastrophes that convulse the face of nature.
Great catastrophes are recorded in the shape of some volcanoes which consist of a circular rim perhaps miles in diameter, inclosing a vast crater or a caldera within which small cones may rise. We may infer that at some time the top of the mountain has been blown off, or has collapsed and been engulfed because some reservoir beneath had been emptied by long-continued eruptions.
"You you surely cannot mean that you do not think Captain Palliser is sincere!" Tembarom laughed outright, his most hilarious and comforting laugh. He had no intention of enlightening her in such a manner as would lead her at once to behold pictures of him as the possible victim of appalling catastrophes. He liked her too well as she was. "Sincere?" he said.
Ah, if she only dared one day to show herself on the stage with all the nobility and simplicity of adjustment that her characters demand; nay, in the disorder into which she would be thrown by an event so terrible as the death of a husband, the loss of a son, and the other catastrophes of the tragic stage, what would become, round her dishevelled figure, of all those powdered, curled, frizzled, tricked-out creatures?
Some suppose great catastrophes to have occasioned sudden changes upon the surface, in having removed immense quantities of the solid body, and in having deposited parts of the removed mass at great distances from their original beds.
It is generally admitted, that it requires a sufficiently long space of time for the same causes to act with the same energy; but this reasoning is just only inasmuch as the shocks are considered as a local phenomenon; and a particular focus, under each point of the globe exposed to those great catastrophes, is admitted.
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