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Three hours carried me to the French shore.  Free from all the vulgar vexations of the road, I had the full enjoyment of one of the most pleasant of all enjoyments—­moving at one’s ease through a new and interesting country.  The road to Paris is now like the road to Windsor, to all the higher portions of my countrymen; but then it was much less known even to them than in later days, and the circumstances of the time gave it a totally new character.  It was the difference between travelling through a country in a state of peace and in a state of war; between going to visit some superb palace for the purpose of viewing its paintings and curiosities, and hurrying to see what part of its magnificence had escaped an earthquake.  The landscape had literally the look of war; troops were seen encamped in the neighbourhood of the principal towns; the national guards were exercising in the fields; mimic processions of children were beating drums and displaying banners in the streets, and the popular songs were all for the conquest of every thing beneath the moon.

But I was to have a higher spectacle.  And I shall never forget the mixture of wonder and awe which I felt at the first distant sight of the capital.

It was at the close of a long day’s journey, while the twilight gave a mysterious hue to a scene in itself singular and stately.—­Glistening spire on spire; massive piles, which in the deepening haze might be either prisons or palaces; vast ranges of buildings, gloomy or glittering as the partial ray fell on them; with the solemn beauty of the Invalides on one wing, the light and lovely elegance of the St Genevieve on the other, and the frowning majesty of Notre-Dame in the midst, filled the plain with a vision such as I had imaged only in an Arabian tale.  Yet the moral reality was even greater than the visible.  I felt that I was within reach of the chief seat of all the leading events of the Continent since the birth of monarchy; every step which I might tread among those piles was historical; within that clouded circumference, like the circle of a necromancer, had been raised all the dazzling and all the disturbing spirits of the world.  There was the grand display of statesmanship, pomp, ambition, pleasure, and each the most subtle, splendid, daring, and prodigal ever seen among men.  And, was it not now to assume even a more powerful influence on the fates of mankind?  Was not the falling of the monarchical forest of so many centuries, about to lay the land open to a new, and perhaps a more powerful produce; where the free blasts of nature were to rear new forms, and demand new arts of cultivation?  The monarchy was falling—­but was not the space, cleared of its ruins, to be filled with some new structure, statelier still?  Or, if the government of the Bourbons were to sink for ever from the eyes of men, were there to be no discoveries made in the gulf itself in which it went down; were there to be no treasures found in the recesses thus thrown open to the eye for the first time; no mines in the dissevered strata—­no founts of inexhaustible freshness and flow opened by thus piercing into the bowels of the land?