We doubt if the weariness and vacuity was as great as her niece was inclined to think. Advanced age and impaired powers always bring a certain deadness and indifference; but she had mental resources the young girl did not take into consideration. She kept a large circle of firm and attached friends. She was not without intellectual pursuits. Although showing no particular genius in any other department of life but the stage, she had a fine cultivated taste for artistic and beautiful things. She employed much of her time in modelling, and executed many respectable pieces of work. Her childish love of Milton revived again now, and after her retirement she published a small volume of extracts from his poems. Above all, she had the support and consolation of a pure unswerving religious faith; through her chequered life of triumph and bereavement, joy and sorrow, Sarah Siddons had ever kept that alive in her heart. It saved her in many a crisis, and illumined the darkened road that lay before her. The following verses, written by her at this time, are a truer indication of her frame of mind than any conclusions drawn from external observation by outsiders:— Say, what’s the brightest wreath of fame, But canker’d buds, that opening close; Ah! what’s the world’s most pleasing dream, But broken fragments of repose? Lead me where peace with steady hand The mingled cup of life shall hold; Where Time shall smoothly pour his sand, And Wisdom turn that sand to gold. Then haply at Religion’s shrine This weary heart its load shall lay, Each _wish_ my fatal love resign, And passion melt in tears away. She had now leisure for journeys abroad and the enjoyment of intellectual pleasure outside her profession which she had never had before. In the autumn of 1814 she made an excursion to Paris in company with her brother John, her youngest daughter, Cecilia, and Miss Wilkinson. A short interval of peace then reigned, and all interested in art flocked from England to see the treasures that Napoleon had plundered from every European capital. The Apollo Belvidere, amongst others, had been set up in the statuary hall of the Louvre; and Campbell tells us how, giving his arm to Mrs. Siddons, they walked down the hall towards it, and stood gazing rapt in its divine beauty. “I could not forget the honour,” Campbell tells us, quaintly, “of being before him in the company of _so august a worshipper_; and it certainly increased my enjoyment to see the first interview between the paragon of Art and that of Nature.” The “paragon of Nature” was evidently much struck, and remained standing silently gazing for some time; then she said, solemnly, “What a great idea it gives us of God, to think that He has made a human being capable of fashioning so divine a form!”