When man's Hope ceases temporarily to take a merely Human
aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar and begin in a new and
Geographical form its beneficent career? The Dark Ladye has sunk
beneath my horizon, but speculations over the Atlantean and Lunar
Mountains are still succulent and vivifying.
[ILLUSTRATION: CHARLES AND JOSEPHINE.]
I fled, lashed by a hundred despairs and by many symptoms of headache
and dyspepsia, from the wedding-feast at Brussels. Charles and the
baron of Hohenfels accompanied me. It was a night-train. The spectacle
of so much wedded happiness was too much for me, too much for
Hohenfels. The effect was, contrarily, rather stimulating to Charles,
who has made a match with Josephine, and with her assistance is
now listening, the tear of sensibility in his eye, to Mendelssohn's
"Wedding March" as executed by the village organ!
We passed Valenciennes, Somain, Donai, Arras, Amiens, Clermont, Criel,
Pontoise--the last points of merely bodily travel that I shall ever
make: here-after my itineracy shall be entirely theoretical. We took
a carriage at Pontoise, and traversed the woods of Saint-Germain. As I
neared home I bowed right and left to amicable and smiling neighbors,
who waved me good-day from their doors. So did my Newfoundland,
who broke his chain and leaped upon my shoulders, flourishing his
tail--overjoyed to salute the returning Ulysses.
[ILLUSTRATION: ARGUS AND ULYSSES.
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