iquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects
more than one in full costume.

"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul
in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about
the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the
World's Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta maenia Romae_--rose before
me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of
the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of
St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus
Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved
figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping
Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These
things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me
so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the
walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and
beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its
reopening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_) fell from
the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the
pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls,
nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they
came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell,
and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in
the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de
la paroisse,"--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes
that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market
on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call
up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle,
reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the
parapet of which Theobald Weinzaepfli's restive horse sprung with him
and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not
dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant
from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all
else.--I remember the Pe