owledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.

Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us
as pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about
statues--that they all look alike to me? There are too many of them.
They bring the ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh
and blood. We do not really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with
AEschylus and Homer. The very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on
a collection of curios in an auction room, droning the dull iteration of
a catalogue. There is as little to awaken and inspire in the system of
religion and ethics of the pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of
the stone effigies that stare blankly upon us in the British Museum, the
Uffizi and the Louvre.

We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity,
the human side quite lost in the archaic. What is Caesar to us, or we to
Caesar? Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than
the Medici Venus for the lights o' love.

Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred
years--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly
ascribe to Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own
world from the dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and
continuing thence through the struggle of man toward achievement--tells
us a tale more consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive,
than may be found in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of
the civilizations which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to
yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag
and Alpine height, from the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to
swallow luxury and culture. Refinement had done its perfect work. It
had emasculated man and unsexed woman and brought her to the front as a
political force, even as it is trying to do now.

The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of
Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age
is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it
does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet
it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the
true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped
them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived
and moved and had their being, and the phantoms o