riosities, and hurrying to see what part of its magnificence had escaped
an earthquake. The landscape had literally the look of war; troops were
seen encamped in the neighbourhood of the principal towns; the national
guards were exercising in the fields; mimic processions of children were
beating drums and displaying banners in the streets, and the popular songs
were all for the conquest of every thing beneath the moon.

But I was to have a higher spectacle. And I shall never forget the mixture
of wonder and awe which I felt at the first distant sight of the capital.

It was at the close of a long day's journey, while the twilight gave a
mysterious hue to a scene in itself singular and stately.--Glistening
spire on spire; massive piles, which in the deepening haze might be either
prisons or palaces; vast ranges of buildings, gloomy or glittering as the
partial ray fell on them; with the solemn beauty of the Invalides on one
wing, the light and lovely elegance of the St Genevieve on the other, and
the frowning majesty of Notre-Dame in the midst, filled the plain with a
vision such as I had imaged only in an Arabian tale. Yet the moral reality
was even greater than the visible. I felt that I was within reach of the
chief seat of all the leading events of the Continent since the birth of
monarchy; every step which I might tread among those piles was historical;
within that clouded circumference, like the circle of a necromancer, had
been raised all the dazzling and all the disturbing spirits of the world.
There was the grand display of statesmanship, pomp, ambition, pleasure,
and each the most subtle, splendid, daring, and prodigal ever seen among
men. And, was it not now to assume even a more powerful influence on the
fates of mankind? Was not the falling of the monarchical forest of so many
centuries, about to lay the land open to a new, and perhaps a more
powerful produce; where the free blasts of nature were to rear new forms,
and demand new arts of cultivation? The monarchy was falling--but was not
the space, cleared of its ruins, to be filled with some new structure,
statelier still? Or, if the government of the Bourbons were to sink for
ever from the eyes of men, were there to be no discoveries made in the
gulf itself in which it went down; were there to be no treasures found in
the recesses thus thrown open to the eye for the first time; no mines in
the dissevered strata--no founts of inexhaustible freshness and flow