and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but
plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than
ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of
massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and
degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with
apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly
quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque,
indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues
of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of
wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet
windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white
orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly
sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up
again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the
square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of
Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her
secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick
water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in
_this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with
beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with
fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one
may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered
teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the
wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave
Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows
of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may
disport itself with freedom enough.[74]

83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our
imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far,
in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom
we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately
took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily
circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our
thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our
work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own;
for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as