Paris, 17th April, 1844. ENFORST to seeke some covert nigh at hand, Did spred so broad, that they heaven's light did hide, And all within were pathes and alleies wide, With footing worne, and leading inward farre : Faire harbour that them seems.' FOR FAERIE QUEENE. OR the first time in my life I now behold green trees upon my birthday. You, my dear who have so frequently seen my table loaded on similar occasions, and so munificently contributed to the costly accumulation, will yet believe me when I declare that no gift of natural affection or benevolent feeling ever swelled my portfolio or embarrassed my bookshelves so completely to my satisfaction as this morning's salutation from the magnificent garden groves of the Tuilleries. B Meurice has mounted us aù cinquième, and for that too I am thankful, for looking forth from our exalted windows, we see to full advantage that ocean of leafy verdure, its vast surface undulating to each capricious air. The silvery poplar, pale brown oak leaf, exuberant chestnut, and sedately feathery elm, emulate each other in their efforts to attract the capricious zephyr to its own tender shade. Every day this royal wood is deepening into a richer hue. Every day (according to its rank in the encampment of Dame Nature) bourgeoning into a more superb luxuriance of fluttering silky green. Yes! every sunrise bears witness to the subtile fingers of Fauna, who, reversing the pious artifice of Penelope, has wonderfully increased her embroidery during the night. Soft airs, exuberant showers, and balmy gleams attend sweet handmaidens to her pleasurable toil. And then those pensive colourings of every pilgrim Eve as they flush the façade of the palace, striking the central Clock-dome and its sister pavilions of Flora and Marsan with harmless lightning, are evermore pausing upon their way to caress affectionately those venerable groves whose regal brows so gracefully acknowledge the visitations of the vernal incense. do not expect You, I am sure, my dear me (and if you did, you would reckon without your host) to write about Paris; but I cannot refrain from expressing in good set terms my admi A Cybele ration of that Cybele of the Seine. indeed not only in her Tiara of tourelles, but also in the glorious, grand, and majestic "Lions," (forgive the high crime and misdemeanour of a pun) which she has yoked to her municipal car. Paris is the living Energy, as Rome is the Sepulchral Sentiment of Romance. Entranced amid the calm glitter, the contradictory attractions of her places and streets, where the dimly cowled Past seems idly to rend asunIder the veil between the time-hallowed horrors of ancient atrocity, and the raw disgust inspired by more recent bloodshed,-I strove in vain to call up all the scenes of terror and cruelty of which Paris had been the theatre, from the skirmishes of the Fronde, and the battles of the League, to the cold blooded atrocities of Robespierre's reign, and the triumphal Occupation of the Allies. The Place de la Concorde, which, from my childhood, I had held accursed, as the fell abattoir of the best of the Bourbons, now flashing with silver fountains, and glittering with gaudy gilded pillars, environed with façades and porticoes, worthy of the Parthenon or the Pantheon, and overshadowed with newly blossomed groves of magnificent chestnut trees, looked as smiling, as pretty, as frivolously gay as if it had never beheld the blue shine of the Guillotine Knife. Even the Place de la Grêve, "That fatal Retreat of the unfortunate Brave," adorned with its splendid Hotel de Ville, and composed of tall fantastic mansions, brightened by a spring tide sunshine, looking down upon the shrubby banks of the Seine, and not at all overgloomed by the steeples of Notre Dame, and the Burgundian peaks of those Prison turrets, the Palais de Justice, failed to convey the very feeblest notion of those horrors of the Ancien Regime, those wheels and quartering blocks, those pincers and searing irons, those luckless assassins in their shirts, and those groans and screams which fire and steel tore from them when without their shirts. All the murky midnight terrors of my youth, whereof Paris hath ever been the favourite scene, vanished from before the paramount effulgence of its meridian Palmy state, which even to my antiquarian taste superseded the temples, the palaces, and the dungeon towers of the Olden Time. They seemed only a subordinate part in this pageant of architecture, just as the Conquerors of Republican Rome compelled her vanquished Kings and Queens to become a foil to their Triumphal processions. It is true, that while gazing on the façade of the Hotel de Sully, luxuriant of Cinque cento ornament, in the noble Rue Saint Antoine, I was beginning to get up a little reverie, which however was nipped in the bud, by a prospect of my speedily joining the illustrious De Rosny in Elysium. Whether my spirit would have found him out I know not, but my body must inevitably |