What is Caesar to us, or we to Caesar?
Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the Medici Venus for the lights o' love.
Not so with Paris.

There the unbroken line of five hundred years--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribe to Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own world from the dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thence through the struggle of man toward achievement--tells us a tale more consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be found in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last to triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture.

Refinement had done its perfect work.

It had emasculated man and unsexed woman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it is trying to do now.
The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there.

Though our age is as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction.