This wonderful Champs Elysees lies before one who stands at the Place de l’Etoile, in its whole length of more than two miles from the Arc de Triomphe to the beautiful Tuilleries gardens. In the daytime it is all foliage and sunshine and brightness; at night the gas-lights glitter in unbroken chains from tree to tree. From one end we can see the fountains play at the other, as they sparkle all day in the square by the old Egyptian obelisk, that marks the place of the guillotine, the memory of which changes all the brightness to gloom in the space of a single thought. Beyond, the half-ruined piles of the Tuilleries palace stand up gray and grim, as if they had not yet recovered from the astonishment and shock of their blows. Further still rise the palace and gallery of the Louvre, which some one has aptly called “the first and last fascination of Paris.” We would make the fascinations plural, and include the Luxembourg gallery, which, though smaller, holds no second place in the Parisian world of art. Let no one fancy our tourists saw the Louvre in a day, or can write of it in a paragraph. What one finds there depends on what one carries in of technical knowledge, in intelligent apprehension, in sympathetic insight and appreciation. Words are not the medium for the description of pictures, or for the transmission of the sense of beauty. One should go to the Louvre once, at least, thinking of the building only. Remember that if it and the adjoining Tuilleries palace were extended their full length along the Seine, we should walk a mile to pass them. Once within, and relieved of our umbrellas, lest we forget ourselves and inadvertently “poke” some antique marble warrior, or try the point upon some crumbling mummy, we climb innumerable stairs and walk over acres of slippery, polished floors, and through rooms heavy with gilded decoration, burdened with every adornment that wealth or taste could devise. The lower floors are devoted to libraries, to Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek museums, and the upper to room after room of paintings, where one wanders at first aimless and bewildered, like a child whose Christmas riches leave it unknowing what first to enjoy. One or two sauntering visits like this, and the great pictures begin to come out from the mass, and we know which are those which belong to us by some subtle power of entering into their significance which we feel, but can not define. Then one by one they begin to lay a touch upon us, and draw us back again and again, for just one other look. How, after a little, our eyes let go, as our souls do also, of nine-tenths of the pictures, those with which we have been able to establish no line of communication, which may be, and are, doubtless, fine, only they are not for us. Then how we yield ourselves to the touch of those that have reached us through their greatness, that could not be resisted. Then we feel the pathos of Triosa’s “Burial,” and the passion of despair in the writhing forms and agonized faces of his “Deluge.” Then we feel the strength in the masterpieces of David, and the exquisite delicacy and suffering and resolve in the “Ecce Homo” of Guido. Here Raphael’s genius shines upon us in the seraphic sweetness of the “Holy Family,” and Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” with its beauty of form and richness of color, and marvelous vigor of conception. And here is the mysterious, half-triumphant, half-timid, grace and beauty of “The Conception,” by Murillo. The longer one lingers, the more one dreads to hear the voice of the guard who calls out the time to close, and when the spell is fairly on one who loves art, he will pass from Louvre to Luxembourg, and back again from Luxembourg to Louvre, unheeding the great, gay, bustling world that is surging up and down between. At the smaller gallery, modern art and living artists are better represented than at the Louvre. Look here for De la Roche and Rosa Bonheur, and if the horrors of the French Revolution are not already coming up too often, as you pass about the city, dwell upon the anguished faces of the prisoners in the picture called “The Night Before Execution,” and I can promise you an afternight of troubled sleep. How gladly one turns from its horrors to the calm, sad strength in the face of the Christ in Ary Scheffer’s “Temptation,” rejoicing in the grand expression the artist has given to the power before which ultimately shall shrink back all the pain of the world, all the horrors and shames of sin. Between the thick walls of her silent galleries, and in the hushed air of her churches, one who had time could find a wealth of association, historical and other, that would enrich weeks spent in their examination alone.