Lead me where peace with steady hand
The mingled cup of life shall hold;
Where Time shall smoothly pour his sand,
And Wisdom turn that sand to gold.
Then haply at Religion’s shrine
This weary heart its load shall lay,
Each wish my fatal love resign,
And passion melt in tears away.
She had now leisure for journeys abroad and the enjoyment of intellectual pleasure outside her profession which she had never had before. In the autumn of 1814 she made an excursion to Paris in company with her brother John, her youngest daughter, Cecilia, and Miss Wilkinson. A short interval of peace then reigned, and all interested in art flocked from England to see the treasures that Napoleon had plundered from every European capital. The Apollo Belvidere, amongst others, had been set up in the statuary hall of the Louvre; and Campbell tells us how, giving his arm to Mrs. Siddons, they walked down the hall towards it, and stood gazing rapt in its divine beauty. “I could not forget the honour,” Campbell tells us, quaintly, “of being before him in the company of so august a worshipper; and it certainly increased my enjoyment to see the first interview between the paragon of Art and that of Nature.”
The “paragon of Nature” was evidently much struck, and remained standing silently gazing for some time; then she said, solemnly, “What a great idea it gives us of God, to think that He has made a human being capable of fashioning so divine a form!”