been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself
invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if
it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery,
etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and
which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually
moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
When I say that I knew no soul in Brussels I am perhaps wrong. With
the present generation I am not familiar. 'En revanche,' the dead
men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in any
cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the
most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the
moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I
call him by his Christian name at once. When you come out of this
place, however, which, as I said, is in the heart of the town,--the
antique gem in the modern setting,--you may go either up or down.
If you go down, you will find yourself in the very nastiest
complications of lanes and culs-de-sac possible, a dark entanglement
of gin-shops, beer-houses, and hovels, through which charming valley
dribbles the Senne (whence, I suppose, is derived Senna), the most
nauseous little river in the world, which receives all the
outpourings of all the drains and houses, and is then converted into
beer for the inhabitants, all the many breweries being directly upon
its edge. If you go up the hill instead of down, you come to an
arrangement of squares, palaces, and gardens as trim and fashionable
as you will find in Europe. Thus you see that our Cybele sits with
her head crowned with very stately towers and her feet in a tub of
very dirty water.

"My habits here for the present year are very regular. I came here,
having, as I thought, finished my work, or rather the first Part
(something like three or four volumes, 8vo), but I find so much
original matter here, and so many emendations to make, that I am
ready to despair. However, there is nothing for it but to
penelopize, pull to pieces, and stitch away again. Whatever may be
the result of my labor, nobody can say that I have not worked like
a brute beast,--but I don't care for the result. The labor is in
itself its own reward and all I want. I go day after day to the
archives here (as I went all su