time.

Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom,
only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the
wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a
great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom--St.
Genevieve, and St. Benedict.

Genevieve, the 'white wave' (Laughing water)--the purest of all the
maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple,
unsullied,--not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the
Leucothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.

White wave on the blue--whether of pure lake or sunny
sea--(thenceforth the colours of France, blue field with white
lilies), she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the
entire soul and life--(so distinguished from the quieter and
restricted innocence of St. Agnes),--and all the traditions of sorrow
in the trial or failure of noble womanhood are connected with her
name; Ginevra, in Italian, passing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and
Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose
pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you,
lugubriously useless;--but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory
and might of this white wave of France.

4. A shepherd maid she was--a tiny thing, barefooted,
bare-headed--such as you may see running wild and innocent, less
cared for now than their sheep, over many a hillside of France and
Italy. Tiny enough;--seven years old, all told, when first
one hears of her: "Seven times one are seven, (I am old, you may trust
me, linnet, linnet[10])," and all around her--fierce as the Furies, and
wild as the winds of heaven--the thunder of the Gothic armies,
reverberate over the ruins of the world.

5. Two leagues from Paris, (_Roman_ Paris, soon to pass away with Rome
herself,) the little thing keeps her flock, not even her own, nor her
father's flock, like David; she is the hired servant of a richer
farmer of Nanterre. Who can tell me anything about Nanterre?--which of
our pilgrims of this omni-speculant, omni-nescient age has thought of
visiting what shrine may be there? I don't know even on what side of
Paris it lies,[11] nor under which heap of railway cinders and iron one
is to conceive the sheep-walks and blossomed fields of fairy St.
Phyllis. There were such left, even in my time, between Paris and St.
Denis, (see the prettiest chapter in all the "Mysteries of Paris,"
where Fleur de Ma