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To make its marvellous meaning plain, For the world was reeling with sound and scent

And glow of the mid-May firmament.

The breath of the furze came over the heath

From the gold above and the gold beneath;
It floated down through the primrose dell
Where the chaffinch builds and the ring-
doves dwell.

Wandering waters with welcome-chime,
Hailed it softly from time to time,

And the nightingale, when the dark drew nigh,

Wove it into his minstrelsy.

The breath of the furze like a dream stole in To the city's heart through the drouth and din,

With a sudden wonder a woman stopped Where a yellow bough in the dust was dropped;

And all in a moment the tears arise
In healing streams to her dull, hard eyes.
And the spark of life that a dead soul keeps
Is newly kindled in sombre deeps.

"I will arise now and go once more
To the cottage gate by the brown seashore;
Where the brooklet-spray to the foam de-
scends

Over the cliff where the furze-brake ends. Perhaps the cowslips are blooming now, Where the whitethroat sings on the whitethorn bough;

Perhaps my mother is waiting still, Where the breath of the furze comes over the hill !"

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So spake the multitude whose beaten track

Some lone soul's patient labor, ages back, Hewed from the living rock that therein they

The children's children-might walk free to-day;

Some poor unhonored sage with brain on rack

And heart on fire, thro' nights that slumber lack

Hearing strange voices that he must obey.

Heavily burdened, on from steep to steep, To far-off wisdom the slow centuries creep; Yet shall be reached that ultimate tableland

Where, high above the creeds, all men shall stand,

And clear discern that over them doth

sweep,

And their wild earth, the Shadow of a Hand.

Cornhill Magazine.

From Macmillan's Magazine.
MADAME DU DEFFAND.

duce it. The conspiracy, it was said, originated in the salon of the Baron d'Holbach, and was promoted by such IF words, as Trench said long ago, men as Grimm, La Harpe, and Laare fossil history, there is an extraor-moignon. It is easy to be wise now dinary significance in the multiplicity and to realize how impossible it was of meanings attached to the word phi-that such a stupendous upheaval could losophy in the last years of the eigh-have been caused by the conspiracy of teenth century in France. "You will a clique; but at the time the accusation think the sentiments of the philoso- was considered of sufficient importance phers very odd state-news," writes to be seriously refuted, and only the Horace Walpole from Paris in 1765. development of events was to show the "But do you know who the philoso- true character and extent of the influphers are? In the first place, the ence of the philosophical doctrines term includes almost every one; in the upon a society sated with luxury and next, it means men who, avowing war inaction, and upon a starving and exagainst popery, aim, many of them, at asperated people. the subversion of all religion, and still many more at the destruction of the regal power."

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It is the social history of these opinions which makes the interest of the life of Madame du Deffand; the curious spectacle of a revolution wrought in thought and opinion long before it

tellectual and pleasure-loving society anticipating in theory almost every revolutionary movement, and fearlessly invoking the spirits which were afterwards to take such monstrous shapes.

The definition is not scientific; yet, read by the light of 1793, it seems fairly adequate. The philosophers was translated into action; of an inthemselves, however, would scarcely have accepted it. They posed only as men who would submit all questions of morals, politics, and religion to the test of reason and natural instinct, rather than of authority and revelation. But their philosophy was not the nymph of the solitudes, but of the salon, the coffee-house, and the mess-room. The dilemma that ensued was an ancient one; the test of reasoning was of varying value in such a world of unreason. It was applied with very different results by the scientific and by a society which played at being intellectual; by the fine lady, who added a piquancy to her toilet by pondering over the last volume of Rousseau and Voltaire between the powder and the patches; by the fine gentleman untrained in politics and all the practical arts of life; by the young enthusiast, wearied of too much civilization, eager for action, and condemned to inglorious ease. The philosophers found themselves in strange company and confronted with unexpected issues. It is well known that those who survived to see the outbreak of the Revolution were as much taken by surprise as the less enlightened public. Yet they were accused of having deliberately conspired to pro

"Your Espinasses, Geoffrins, Deffands play their part too," says Carlyle in his cumbrous phrase; "there shall in all senses be not only philosophers, but philosophesses." One of her own countrymen says more gracefully that Madame du Deffand is the most characteristic figure in French society from the days of the Regency to the first years of Louis the Sixteenth; and indeed she seems to intensify in her own person the brilliancy, the restlessness, the intellectual curiosity, the devouring ennui of her world. It was her fate to live in a society in fermentation, "incredibly active in mind;" to have been touched in her youth with the pitch of its defilement; and in her old age to preach in spite of herself, from her cynic's tub, on the vanity of the world, although, poor woman, she hated sermons, and made a stipulation even on her death-bed to be spared them. "M. le curé," she says, when he comes for her last confession, "you shall really have no cause to complain of me, but do let me

beg you to spare me three things, ques- | French civilization is from Walpole's tions, arguments, and sermons."

pen.

In the span of her eighty years Madame du Deffand had witnessed great Madame du Deffand [he writes to Gray changes. She had seen the gloom of in 1766] is now very old, and stone-blind, the last days of Louis the Fourteenth, but retains all the vivacity, wit, memory, the wild excesses of the Regency, and judgment, passions, and agreeableness of her youth. She goes to operas, plays, supshe lived to hear with unheeding ears the first mutterings of the Revolution. pers, and Versailles; gives dinners twice a week, has everything new read to her, Without decided beauty, she had yet makes new songs and epigrams very admicontrived to subjugate princes and rably, and remembers every one that has philosophers by her wit and her bril- been made these fourscore years; correliant eyes. But her greatest social tri-sponds with Voltaire, dictates letters to umphs were won when she was old and him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him, blind. It was in the last twenty-seven or to any one else, and laughs both at the years of her life, in her rooms in the clergy and philosophers. In a dispute, into Convent St. Joseph, Rue St. Domi- which she easily falls, she is very warm, nique, that she gathered round her and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judg"tub of Diogenes," as she loved to call ment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong her high-backed chair, foreign princes, as possible, for she is all love and hatred, ambassadors, ministers, encyclopedists, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, all that were worth knowing in Paris in still anxious to be loved-I don't mean by the last quarter of a century before the lovers-and a vehement enemy but openly. Revolution. Affectionate as Madame de Sévigné she has none of her prejudices, but a more

sets to right their disciples, and finds conversation for everybody. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least solitude or ennui is insupportable to her;

with the most delicate frame in the world

her spirits hurry her through a life of fatigue that would kill me if I were to stay here. If we return by one in the morning from suppers in the country, she proposes driving to the Boulevard, or the Foire, because it is too early to go to bed.

At the age of seventy she conceived a passionate fondness for Horace Wal-universal taste; she humbles the learned, pole, and in the intervals of his visits corresponded with him from 1766 till almost the day of her death in 1780. During that time she kept him so thoroughly informed of French affairs, that when, at the time of the disgrace of the Duc de Choiseul, with whom she was intimately connected, Walpole's rooms in Arlington Street were mysteriously ransacked of papers, it was generally supposed that the thieves were agents of the French government. Madame du Deffand's letters, however, survived that disaster, and have preserved, as all lovers of such literature know, an extraordinary picture of the last years of the Ancien Régime. Side by side with this, they have the minor interest of an epistolary drama, in which Walpole plays the ungrateful part of Madame de Grignan, and Madame du Deffand that of Madame de Sévigné with a difference. The plight of the undemonstrative Englishman, thus posed as a reluctant idol, is sometimes not a little ridiculous, and that of his disappointed worshipper not a little painful; yet the most sympathetic portrait we have of this curious product of

6

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In the memoirs of her own countrymen Madame du Deffand is a familiar figure, but their treatment of her is not so uniformly sympathetic. It is perhaps a little like that she was accused of applying to her own friends. dame du Deffand," says M. Thomas, "reminds me of an ingenuous speech of a doctor I once knew. My friend fell ill; I doctored him; he died; I 999 For dissection was dissected him.' the vogue; it was natural in a people living so incessantly in society. The memoirs and correspondence of those days are full of portraits (often extremely insipid), and they were the constant amusement of fashionable wits. The tendency took its most mor

lished clubs for the study of natural science; they attended the most learned discussions at the academies ; one marquise goes to see dissections performed; another dissects with her own hands.

bid form in the "Confessions" of Jean | discussing. "They talk philosophy at Jacques Rousseau; but this love of balls," says Ségur again, "and moral analysis, of going back to first princi- science in boudoirs." These people ples and first experiences of the senses, of quality, "who know everything was the key-note of much of the litera- without the trouble of learning," estabture, as well as the science of France in the eighteenth century. It would seem that the condition of society was so mortal, that it must brood upon its own symptoms and analyze every sensation, if so it might find out what ailed it. Whenever we can penetrate behind the gaiety and talk, the ceaseless stir of pleasure, it is the same story; a restless retrospection, a craving to solve somehow the miserable mystery of humanity, to find some foothold in the bottomless pit of the unknown, lies behind this brilliant social life of which we hear so much. It drove men, who had thrown off every form of ancient belief and custom as an intolerable burden, to the mystical doctrines of Swedenborg or St. Martin, to dreams of the possibility of communication between men and spirits, of the universal efficacy of the animal magnetism it was said, might thus be made to of Mesmer, or of the infallibility understand its mysteries. The deepest of the utterances of somnambulism. "France," says M. de Ségur, who lived through so many stages of the revolutionary fever, 66 was in those last years visibly tormented with that restlessness, that uneasiness, that extravagance of feeling, which precedes great moral and political crises."

And philosophy was quite ready to meet them half-way. The most serious scientific works were dedicated to women, and some of the profoundest speculations in the imaginary dialogues of Voltaire and Diderot were put into the mouth of the marquis or the maréchale. It was a part of the philosophic faith that the methods by which scientific truth might be attained were so obvious, so clear to the most uninstructed understanding, that, given the facts, no more trouble was needed than the power to follow out the successive links of an argument. Even women,

Vol

subjects were discussed not only in the salons frequented by the encyclopedists, but in those presided over by women. It was natural that under such an influence the expression of the thought, the art of style, should become of supreme importance. "Pour faire passer L'Esprit des Lois' MonThe salons, which had been the cen- tesquieu faisait de l'esprit sur les lois," tres of intellectual life since the days says Madame du Deffand. As a result, of Louis the Fourteenth, took the fever the man of science in France could not seriously. They were seized with a be the mere student, the line of depassion for philosophy, for philan-marcation between the literary and the thropy, for all the whims which were scientific man ceased to exist. taking shape in the storm-laden air of taire makes scientific experiments with those days before the flood. They em- the prism of Newton and the thermombraced the deism of Voltaire, the ma- eter of Réaumur; he sends pamphlets terialism of Diderot and D'Holbach, to the Academy of Science on the the pure atheism of Helvetius; or they measure of motive force and the nadreamed with Rousseau and St. Pierre ture and propagation of heat. The of a renovated humanity yielding to mathematician D'Alembert writes upon every impulse of nature, and by that elocution, the naturalist Buffon upon meaus returning to its pristine inno- style, the psychologist Condillac on cence. It is not only Walpole who the art of writing; and men of scigrumbles that the French were no ence, morals, politics, each and all had longer the same people, that they had the habit of writing, speaking, and lost their vivacity, and were forever thinking before a fashionable audience.

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