At any rate, for the present it must hang undisturbed.

Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce.

Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.
It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clouds--haloed most of them--but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments.

Farewell, luminous phantoms! This is Belgium, reader.

Look! don't call the picture a flat or a dull one--it was neither flat nor dull to me when I first beheld it.