Parisians, the — Volume 01 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 66 of 83 (79%)
page 66 of 83 (79%)
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has little interest even for me, it is that I wish to distract my mind
from brooding over the question that interests me most, and on which I most need your counsel. I will try to approach it in my next. ISAURA. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME. Eulalie, Eulalie!--What mocking spirit has been permitted in this modern age of ours to place in the heart of woman the ambition which is the prerogative of men? You indeed, so richly endowed with a man's genius, have a right to man's aspirations. But what can justify such ambition in me? Nothing but this one unintellectual perishable gift of a voice that does but please in uttering the thoughts of others. Doubtless I could make a name familiar for its brief time to the talk of Europe,--a name, what name? a singer's name. Once I thought that name a glory. Shall I ever forget the day when you first shone upon me; when, emerging from childhood as from a dim and solitary bypath, I stood forlorn on the great thoroughfare of life, and all the prospects before me stretched sad in mists and in rain? You beamed on me then as the sun coming out from the cloud and changing the face of earth; you opened to my sight the fairy- land of poetry and art; you took me by the hand and said, "Courage! there is at each step some green gap in the hedgerows, some, soft escape from the stony thoroughfare. Beside the real life expands the ideal life to those who seek it. Droop not, seek it: the ideal life has its sorrows, but it never admits despair; as on the ear of him who follows the winding course of a stream, the stream ever varies the note of its music,--now loud with the rush of the falls; now low and calm as it |
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