This eBook was produced by Dagny,
and David Widger,
MYSTERIOUS impulse at the heart, which never suffers us to be at rest,which urges us onward as by an unseen yet irresistible law—humanplanets in a petty orbit, hurried forever and forever, till our courseis run and our light is quenched—through the circle of a dark andimpenetrable destiny! art thou not some faint forecast and type of ourwanderings hereafter; of the unslumbering nature of the soul; of theeverlasting progress which we are predoomed to make through thecountless steps and realms and harmonies in the infinite creation? Oh,often in my rovings have I dared to dream so,—often have I soared onthe wild wings of thought above the "smoke and stir" of this dim earth,and wrought, from the restless visions of my mind, a chart of theglories and the wonders which the released spirit may hereafter visitand behold!
What a glad awakening from self,—what a sparkling and fresh draughtfrom a new source of being,—what a wheel within wheel, animating,impelling, arousing all the rest of this animal machine, is the firstexcitement of Travel! the first free escape from the bonds of the linkedand tame life of cities and social vices,—the jaded pleasure and thehollow love, the monotonous round of sordid objects and dulldesires,—the eternal chain that binds us to things and beings,mockeries of ourselves,—alike, but oh, how different! the shock thatbrings us nearer to men only to make us strive against them, and learn,from the harsh contest of veiled deceit and open force, that the more weshare the aims of others, the more deeply and basely rooted we grow tothe littleness of self!
I passed more lingeringly through France than I did through the otherportions of my route. I had dwelt long enough in the capital to beanxious to survey the country. It was then that the last scale whichthe magic of Louis Quatorze and the memory of his gorgeous court hadleft upon the mortal eye fell off, and I saw the real essence of thatmonarch's greatness and the true relics of his reign. I saw the poor,and the degraded, and the racked, and the priest-ridden, tillers andpeoplers of the soil, which made the substance beneath the glitteringand false surface,—the body of that vast empire, of which I hadhitherto beheld only the face, and THAT darkly, and for the most partcovered by a mask!
No man can look upon France, beautiful France,—her rich soil, hertemperate yet maturing clime, the gallant and bold spirits which sheproduces, her boundaries so indicated and protected by Nature itself,her advantages of ocean and land, of commerce and agriculture,—and notwonder that her prosperity should be so bloated, and her real state sowretched and diseased.
Let England draw the moral, and beware not only of wars which exhaust,but of governments which impoverish. A waste of the public wealth isthe most lasting of public afflictions; and "the treasury which isdrained by extravagance must be refilled by crime."*
* Tacitus.
I remember one beautiful evening an accident to my carriage occasionedmy sojourn for a whole afternoon in a small village. The Cure honouredme with a visit; and we strolled, after a slight repast, into thehamlet. The priest was complaisant, quiet in manner, and not illinformed for his obscure station and scanty opportunities of knowledge;he did not seem, however, to possess the vivacity of his countrymen, butwas rather melancholy and pensive, not only in his expression ofcount