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