e world have called in nature
to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands,
parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender
and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich
man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but
the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling
stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some
Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of
the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works
of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with
servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men
reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if
the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military
band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous
chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a
hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the
mountains into an Aeolian harp,--and this supernatural tiralira restores
to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and
huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful!
To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he
is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his
imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That
they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live
in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in
coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places
and to distant cities,--these make the groundwork from which he
has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual
possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son,
and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation
out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,--a certain
haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of
aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.

The mor