ths.

Away to your right, through a great gap in this singular landscape,
you see the canal Saint-Martin, a long pale stripe with its edging
of reddish stone quays and fringes of lime avenue. The long rows of
buildings beside it, in genuine Roman style, are the public granaries.

Beyond, again, on the very last plane of all, see the smoke-dimmed
slopes of Belleville covered with houses and windmills, which blend
their freaks of outline with the chance effects of cloud. And still,
between that horizon, vague as some childish recollection, and the
serried range of roofs in the valley, a whole city lies out of sight: a
huge city, engulfed, as it were, in a vast hollow between the pinnacles
of the Hopital de la Pitie and the ridge line of the Cimetiere de l'Est,
between suffering on the one hand and death on the other; a city sending
up a smothered roar like Ocean grumbling at the foot of a cliff, as if
to let you know that "I am here!"

When the sunlight pours like a flood over this strip of Paris, purifying
and etherealizing the outlines, kindling answering lights here and there
in the window panes, brightening the red tiles, flaming about the golden
crosses, whitening walls and transforming the atmosphere into a gauzy
veil, calling up rich contrasts of light and fantastic shadow; when the
sky is blue and earth quivers in the heat, and the bells are pealing,
then you shall see one of the eloquent fairy scenes which stamp
themselves for ever on the imagination, a scene that shall find as
fanatical worshipers as the wondrous views of Naples and Byzantium or
the isles of Florida. Nothing is wanting to complete the harmony, the
murmur of the world of men and the idyllic quiet of solitude, the voices
of a million human creatures and the voice of God. There lies a whole
capital beneath the peaceful cypresses of Pere-Lachaise.

The landscape lay in all its beauty, sparkling in the spring sunlight,
as I stood looking out over it one morning, my back against a huge
elm-tree that flung its yellow flowers to the wind. At the sight of the
rich and glorious view before me, I thought bitterly of the scorn with
which even in our literature we affect to hold this land of ours, and
poured maledictions on the pitiable plutocrats who fall out of love with
fair France, and spend their gold to acquire the right of sneering at
their own country, by going through Italy at a gallop and inspecting
that desecrated land through an opera-glass. I