the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.  Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.  This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens,[481] villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories.  I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries.  These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises.  We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars.  In their soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484] Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise baubles.  When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds.  Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!  A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him.  He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an AEolian harp,[486] and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] and all divine hunters and huntresses.  Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful!  To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich!  That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks.  The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,—­a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.