Years later, in the summer of 1880, I was again in Paris, with my two elder brothers, one of them a schoolmaster, the other a tutor at Oxford. Again, as at the former time, we were returning from Switzerland. Scenes of infancy were entirely out of our thoughts. We were returning to work — the work of the master at an ancient school, of the tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and of the freshman at Trinity College, Cambridge. We were young men immersed in the academic life of England. The future, like the dream road from the palace to the unknown, lay before us. But suddenly, as I stood in the gardens of the Tuileries, I found the very place of my dreams. The seat was there; the road was there; and the park was there. The dream that had haunted boyhood was discovered to be a reality held in memory.
The vision of the child had caught a glimpse of the pageant of history, and again the second vision gave the tragic interpretation. The palace now stood a ruin, with its charred walls. The Emperor, Napoleon II, had died an exile in England. The road led to Sedan, and the gallant regiments of the French Empire had marched to their doom. The final act of the Napoleonic drama, for which during eighty years Europe was the stage — this final phase, at the glitter of its height and in its downfall, had been flashed upon me in two visions of a seat, a palace, and a road.
At the time of the first vision to the child playing in the garden, secure within his own small world of feelings, human life was exhibiting every diverse phase of horror, enjoyment, and ambition. On September 2, 1864, Atlanta was occupied by the Union forces, and almost immediately Sherman submitted to Grant his plan for his march from Atlanta to the sea — at the very time when the child was playing in the garden. Bismarck was perfecting the policy which brought about the overthrow of Austria within two years. Italy was waiting to seize Rome. The Pope was consolidating his control over the Church, to balance his loss of temporal power. England was nearing the end of the second of its only two long periods of complete security, after the defeat of Louis XIV and after the defeat of Napoleon. Each period was marked by the dominance of a small group of liberal aristocrats.
II
But the history of the world is not focused in any one life. Lincoln had one experience, and his fellow countrymen had each their own experience. The great events that historians speak of influenced more or less directly the lives of all men. But the stuff of human life cannot be wholly construed in terms of historical events; it mainly consists of feelings arising from reactions between small definite groups of persons.
For this reason the generalized history of an epoch sadly misrepresents the real individual feelings of the quiet people in back streets and in country
