We passed through the quarter of Paris known as the Pays Latin, the aspect of which is singular, and is said to have been little changed during the last century.  The houses, chiefly occupied by literary men, look quaint and picturesque.  Every man one sees passing has the air of an author, not as authors now are, or at least as popular ones are, well-clothed and prosperous-looking, but as authors were when genius could not always command a good wardrobe, and walked forth in habiliments more derogatory to the age in which it was neglected, than to the individual whose poverty compelled such attire.

Men in rusty threadbare black, with books under the arm, and some with spectacles on nose, reading while they walked along, might be encountered at every step.

The women, too, in the Pays Latin, have a totally different aspect to those of every other part of Paris.  The desire to please, inherent in the female breast, seems to have expired in them, for their dress betrays a total neglect, and its fashion is that of some forty years ago.  Even the youthful are equally negligent, which indicates their conviction that the men they meet seldom notice them, proving the truth of the old saying, that women dress to please men.

The old, with locks of snow, who had grown into senility in this erudite quarter, still paced the same promenade which they had trodden for many a year, habit having fixed them where hope once led their steps.  The middle-aged, too, might be seen with hair beginning to blanch from long hours devoted to the midnight lamp, and faces marked with “the pale cast of thought.”  Hope, though less sanguine in her promises, still lures them on, and they pass the venerable old, unconscious that they themselves are succeeding them in the same life of study, to be followed by the same results, privation, and solitude, until death closes the scene.  And yet a life of study is, perhaps, the one in which the privations compelled by poverty are the least felt to be a hardship.

Study, like virtue, is its own exceeding great reward, for it engrosses as well as elevates the mind above the sense of the wants so acutely felt by those who have no intellectual pursuits; and many a student has forgotten his own privations when reading the history of the great and good who have been exposed to even still more trying ones.  Days pass uncounted in such occupations.  Youth fleets away, if not happily, at least tranquilly, while thus employed; and maturity glides into age, and age drops into the grave, scarcely conscious of the gradations of each, owing to the mind having been filled with a continuous train of thought, engendered by study.

I have been reading some French poems by Madame Amabel Tastu; and very beautiful they are.  A sweet and healthy tone of mind breathes through them, and the pensiveness that characterises many of them, marks a reflecting spirit imbued with tenderness.  There is great harmony, too, in the versification, as well as purity and elegance in the diction.  How much some works make us wish to know their authors, and vice versa!  I feel, while reading her poems, that I should like Madame Amabel Tastu; while other books, whose cleverness I admit, convince me I should not like the writers.