d the gallant captains of the
garrison to the change; and they fully enjoyed the contrast between a
night on the ramparts, and the hours spent at the Prussian
generalissimo's splendidly furnished table. The ball which followed
exhibited a crowd of the _belles_ of Longwy, all as happy as dress and
dancing could make them. It was a charming episode in the sullen
history of campaigning, and before I flung myself on the embroidered
sofa of the mayor's drawing-room, where my billet had been given for
the night, I was on terms of eternal "friendship" with a whole group
of classic beauties--Aspasias, Psyches and Cleopatras.

But neither love nor luxury, neither the smiles of that fair
_Champagnaises_, nor the delight of treading on the tesselated floors,
and feasting on the richness of municipal tables, could now detain us.
We were in our saddles by daybreak, and with horses that outstripped
the wind, with hearts light as air, and with prospects of endless
victory and orders and honours innumerable before us, we galloped
along, preceded, surrounded, and followed by the most showy squadrons
that ever wore lace and feathers. The delight of this period was
indescribable. It was to me a new birth of faculties that resembled a
new sense of being, a buoyant and elastic lightness of feelings and
frame. The pure air; the perpetual change of scene; the novelty of the
landscape; the restless and vivid variety of events, and those too of
the most powerful and comprehensive nature; the superb display of the
finest army that the Continent had sent to war for the last hundred
years; and all this excitement and enjoyment, with an unrivaled vista
of matchless conquest in the horizon, a triumphal march through the
provinces, to be consummated by the peace of Europe in Paris, filled
even my vexed and wearied spirit with new life. If I am right in my
theory, that the mind reaches stages of its growth with as much
distinctness as the frame, this was one of them. I was conscious from
this time of a more matured view of human being, of a clearer
knowledge of its impulses, of a more vigorous, firm, and enlarged
capacity for dealing with the real concerns of life. I still loved;
and, strange, hopeless, and bewildering as that passion was in the
breast of one who seemed destined to all the diversities of
fortune--it remained without relief, or relaxation through all. It was
the vein of gold, or perhaps the stream of fire, beneath the soil,
inaccessib