And all the rest forgot, for which he toiled.’
The new streets and squares in this neighbourhood are also on an improved plan—there is a double side-path to walk on, the shops are more roomy and richer, and you can stop to look at them in safety. This is as it should be—all we ask is common sense. Without this practical concession on their parts, in the dispute whether Paris is not better than London, it would seem to remain a question, whether it is better to walk on a mall or in a gutter, whether airy space is preferable to fetid confinement, or whether solidity and show together are not better than mere frippery? But for a real West End, for a solid substantial cut into the heart of a metropolis, commend me to the streets and squares on each side of the top of Oxford-street—with Grosvenor and Portman squares at one end, and Cavendish and Hanover at the other, linked together by Bruton, South-Audley, and a hundred other fine old streets, with a broad airy pavement, a display of comfort, of wealth, of taste, and rank all about you, each house seeming to have been the residence of some respectable old English family for half a century past, and with Portland-place looking out towards Hampstead and Highgate, with their hanging gardens and lofty terraces, and Primrose-hill nestling beneath them, in green, pastoral luxury, the delight of the Cockney, the aversion of Sir Walter and his merry-men! My favourite walk in Paris is to the Gardens of the Tuileries. Paris differs from London in this respect, that it has no suburbs. The moment you are beyond the barriers, you are in the country to all intents and purposes. You have not to wade through ten miles of straggling houses to get a breath of fresh air, or a peep at nature. It is a blessing to counterbalance the inconveniences of large cities built within walls, that they do not extend far beyond them. The superfluous population is pared off, like the pie-crust by the circumference of the dish—even on the court side, not a hundred yards from the barrier of Neuilly, you see an old shepherd tending his flock, with his dog and his crook and sheep-skin cloak, just as if it were a hundred miles off, or a hundred years ago. It was so twenty years ago. I went again to see if it was the same yesterday. The old man was gone; but there was his flock by the road-side, and a dog and a boy, grinning with white healthy teeth, like one of Murillo’s beggar-boys. It was a bright frosty noon; and the air was, in a manner, vitreous, from its clearness, its coolness, and hardness to the feeling. The road I speak of, frequented by English jockeys and French market-women, riding between panniers, leads down to the Bois de Boulogne on the left, a delicious retreat, covered with copse-wood for fuel, and intersected by greensward paths and shady alleys, running for miles in opposite directions, and terminating in a point of inconceivable brightness. Some of the woods on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire present exactly the same appearance, with the same delightful sylvan paths through them, and are covered in summer with hyacinths and primroses, sweetening the air, enamelling the ground, and with nightingales loading every bough with rich music. It was winter when I used to wander through the Bois de Boulogne formerly, dreaming of fabled truth and good. Somehow my thoughts and feet still take their old direction, though hailed by no friendly greetings:—
‘What though the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for ever vanished from my sight;
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass—of splendour in the flower:’—
yet the fever and the agony of hope is over too, ‘the burden and the mystery;’ the past circles my head, like a golden dream; it is a fine fragment of an unfinished poem or history; and the ‘worst,’ as Shakspeare says, ‘returns to good!’ I cannot say I am at all annoyed (as I expected) at seeing the Bourbon court-carriages issuing out with a flourish of trumpets and a troop of horse. It looks like a fantoccini procession, a State mockery. The fine moral lesson, the soul of greatness, is wanting. The legitimate possessors of royal power seem to be playing at Make-Believe; the upstarts and impostors are the true Simon Pures and genuine realities. Bonaparte mounted a throne from the top of the pillar of Victory. People ask who Charles X. is? But to return from this digression.
Through the arch-way of the Tuileries, at the end of the Champs Elysées, you see the Barrier of Neuilly, like a thing of air, diminished by a fairy perspective. The effect is exquisitely light and magical. You pass through the arch-way, and are in the gardens themselves. Milton should have written those lines abroad, and in this very spot—
‘And bring with thee retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.’