I fear that the Restoration will ruin itself through holding ideas contrary to those which I have here expressed: the mania for adhering to the past, a mania which I never cease impugning, would be in no sense fatal if it subverted only myself, by robbing me of the Sovereign's favour; but it may yet subvert the Throne. Political stagnation is impossible; it is absolutely necessary to keep pace with human intelligence. Let us respect the majesty of time; let us reverentially contemplate past centuries, rendered sacred by the memory and the footsteps of our fathers: but let us not try to go back to them, for they no longer possess a vestige of our real nature, and if we endeavoured to seize hold of them, they would fade away. The Chapter of Our Lady of Aix-la-Chapelle caused the tomb of Charlemagne[506] to be opened, we are told, about the year 1450. The Emperor was found seated in a gilt chair, holding in his skeleton hands the Book of the Gospels written in letters of gold; before him were laid his sceptre and his golden buckler; by his side hung his sword "Joyeuse," sheathed in a golden scabbard. He was clad in the imperial robes. On his head, which was held erect by a golden chain, was a winding-sheet covering what had been his face and surmounted by a crown. They touched the phantom: it crumbled into dust.
We once possessed vast countries beyond the seas: they offered a refuge for our surplus population, markets for our commerce, stations for our navy. We are now excluded from the new world in which the human race is beginning life afresh: in Africa, Asia, Oceania, in the South Sea Islands, on the continent of North and South America, the English, Portuguese, and Spanish languages serve to interpret the thoughts of many millions of men; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our valour and our genius, scarce hear the tongue of Colbert and Louis XIV. spoken in some petty market-town of Louisiana or Canada, under a foreign government: it lingers there only as a witness to the reverses of our fortune and the errors of our policy.
And who is the king whose dominion now succeeds the dominion of the King of France in the forests of Canada? He who yesterday caused this note to be sent to me:
"Royal Lodge, Windsor,
"4 June 1822.
"Monsieur le Vicomte,
"I am commanded by the King to invite Your Excellency to dine and sleep here on Thursday the 6th instant.
"Your Excellency's most humble and obedient servant,
"Francis Conyngham[507]."
It was fated that I should be plagued by princes. I lay down my pen; I recross the Atlantic; I mend my arm broken at Niagara; I take off my bearskin; I resume my gold-laced coat; I leave the wigwam of an Iroquois to repair to the Royal Lodge of His Britannic Majesty, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Lord of the Indies; I leave my hosts with the exposed ears and my little girl-savage with her bead: wishing Lady Conyngham[508] the charm of Mila, together with the age which as yet belongs only to the earliest spring-time, to the days which precede the month of May and which our Gallic poets called the avrillée, the April shower.
*
The tribe of the little girl with the bead departed; my guide, the Dutchman, refused to accompany me beyond the cataract; I paid him and joined a party of traders who were leaving to go down the Ohio; before setting out, I took a glance at the Canadian lakes. There is nothing so mournful as the aspect of these lakes. The liquid plains of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean open highways to the nations, and their shores are, or were, inhabited by civilized, numerous, and powerful peoples; the lakes of Canada display only the nakedness of their waters, which, in its turn, is joined to a bare soil: they are deserts dividing other deserts. Shores devoid of inhabitants look upon seas devoid of ships; you alight from the unfrequented waves upon unfrequented coasts.
Lake Erie.
Lake Erie is over one hundred leagues in circumference. The nations of the water-side were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago. It is an appalling thing to see the Indians venturing in their birch-bark wherries upon this lake famed for its tempests, in which myriads of serpents swarmed in former days. These Indians hang their manitous upon the prow of their canoes and dart into the midst of the eddies among the heaving waves. The waves, level with the aperture of the canoes, seem ready to swallow them up. The hunters' dogs, with their front-paws resting on the side, utter loud barks, while their masters, preserving a profound silence, beat the waves in cadence with their paddles. The canoes proceed in Indian file: in the prow of the first stands a chief who repeats the diphthong oah: o in a long, dull note, ah in a short, sharp tone. In the last canoe is another chief, who also stands up, and works an oar by way of rudder. The other braves squat upon their heels at the bottom of the well. Across the mist and the winds one perceives nothing save the plumes adorning the Indians' heads, the outstretched necks of the baying dogs, and the shoulders of the two sachems, the pilot and the augur: as it were the gods of these lakes.
The rivers of Canada play no part in the history of the world of antiquity: how different from the destiny of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Danube, and the Rhine! What changes have not these beheld upon their banks! How much sweat and blood has been poured forth by conquerors to cross, in their current, waters over which, at their source, a goatherd passes with a single step!