as always represented _with a diadem on her
head_.

CHAPTER VII.

REFLECTIONS.--A SOIREE.--THE APPEARANCE OF ONE IMPORTANT IN THE
HISTORY.--A CONVERSATION WITH MADAME DE BALZAC HIGHLY SATISFACTORY AND
CHEERING.--A RENCONTRE WITH A CURIOUS OLD SOLDIER.--THE EXTINCTION OF A
ONCE GREAT LUMINARY.

I HAD now been several weeks at Paris; I had neither eagerly sought
nor sedulously avoided its gayeties. It is not that one violent sorrow
leaves us without power of enjoyment; it only lessens the power, and
deadens the enjoyment: it does not take away from us the objects of
life; it only forestalls the more indifferent calmness of age. The blood
no longer flows in an irregular but delicious course of vivid and wild
emotion; the step no longer spurns the earth; nor does the ambition
wander, insatiable, yet undefined, over the million paths of existence:
but we lose not our old capacities; they are quieted, not extinct. The
heart can never utterly and long be dormant: trifles may not charm it
any more, nor levities delight; but its pulse has not yet ceased to
beat. We survey the scene that moves around, with a gaze no longer
distracted by every hope that flutters by; and it is therefore that we
find ourselves more calculated than before for the graver occupations
of our race. The overflowing temperament is checked to its proper level,
the ambition bounded to its prudent and lawful goal. The earth is no
longer so green, nor the heaven so blue, nor the fancy that stirs within
us so rich in its creations; but we look more narrowly on the living
crowd, and more rationally on the aims of men. The misfortune which
has changed us has only adapted us the better to a climate in which
misfortune is a portion of the air. The grief that has thralled our
spirit to a more narrow and dark cell has also been a change that has
linked us to mankind with a strength of which we dreamed not in the day
of a wilder freedom and more luxuriant aspirings. In later life, a new
spirit, partaking of that which was our earliest, returns to us. The
solitude which delighted us in youth, but which, when the thoughts that
make solitude a fairy land are darkened by affliction, becomes a fearful
and sombre void, resumes its old spell, as the more morbid and urgent
memory of that affliction crumbles away by time. Content is a hermit;
but so also is Apathy. Youth loves the solitary couch, which it
surrounds with dreams. Age, or Experience (which is the mind's ag