I, as luck would have it, after camping in Iroquois shelters and Arab tents, after wearing the cloak of the savage and the caftan of the mameluke, have sat at the tables of kings only to relapse into indigence. I have meddled with peace and war; I have signed treaties and protocols; I have taken part in sieges, congresses and conclaves, in the restoration and overturning of thrones; I have made history and I could write it: and my solitary and silent life went on through the tumult and uproar in the company of the daughters of my imagination, Atala, Amélie, Bianca, Velléda, without speaking of what I might call the realities of my days, if they had not themselves been the seduction of chimeras. I am afraid lest I should have a soul of the nature of that which an ancient philosopher called a sacred sickness[447]. I have found myself caught between two ages, as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards an unknown shore[448]. The whole of geography has changed since, according to the expression of our old customs, I was able to look at the sky from my bed. If I compare the two terrestrial globes, the one at the commencement, the other at the end of my life, I no longer recognise them. A fifth part of the world, Australia, has been discovered and populated[449]; French sails have recently caught sight of a sixth continent amid the ice-fields of the Antarctic Pole[450], and the Parrys, Rosses and Franklins have turned the coasts, on our own pole, that mark the limits of North America; Africa has opened its mysterious solitudes; in short, there is not a corner of our abode that is at present unknown. We are attacking all the necks of land that separate the world; soon, no doubt, we shall see ships pass through the Isthmus of Panama and, perhaps, the Isthmus of Suez[451]. [Sidenote: The world of the future.]