her; exquisite in her little reserves and quiet pride when she is thrown into that society of which her tastes render her not unworthy. A few passages from her first interview with the young M. de Morand will illustrate the extreme delicacy with which she is described, and the general tone of the uneventful drama in which she figures. She has been decoyed by stratagem to a lady's house, where some of her sister artisans are at work. She is surprised into dancing, after having been a by-word among her mates for holding herself aloof from their balls. André, less assured than herself, dares not ask her to dance with him at first; presently, however, he accomplishes the feat. “But he danced with her without being able to say a syllable to her : the words died upon his lips as fast as they rose. He was afraid of talking, for his heart was beating, and his head was troubled. When he had to lead her forward en avant deux, he forgot himself, and let the couple vis-a-vis advance by themselves; then, next moment, he advanced to make up for his blunder, danced another figure, and spoiled the whole quadrille, to the infinite diversion of all the young girls. Genevieve, however, did not join them in making game of him; she was silent and reserved, but she regarded André with a certain complacency: he had spoken so well of botany, and that went far with her to abridge the timid preliminaries of their becoming acquainted. But though André had dared to take part in the conversation, and aim at her in his general remarks, he was no longer the same when obliged to speak directly to her. His timidity, in proportion as it was extreme, diminished that of Genevieve : for she was proud rather than prudish. She shrunk from the coarse and threadbare compliments which were bestowed upon her companions ; but, in better company, she was easy, and in her own element. : : “They tell us Poetry is dying; but Poetry cannot die. Had she but for place of sojourn the brain of one human being, there would be still ages of existence before her; for she would issue thence, like the lava from a volcano, and strike out a path for herself amidst the dreariest realities. Though her temples be overthrown, and false gods worshipped among their ruins, she is still as immortal as the perfume of Aowers, as the glory of the heavens. Banished from the high places of society, and rejected by the rich-shut out of the theatre, the church, the academy, she will take refuge with the citizen and the mechanic, and she will intermingle herself with the simplest details of their daily life. Weary of uttering a language which the great no longer comprehend, she will murmur in the ear of the humble words of affection and sympathy. And in Germany has she not already descended into the cellars of the tavern? has she not sat at the spinning-wheel? not cradled in her arms the infants of the poor? Are we to count for nothing all those living souls * * * who possess her, who suffer and keep silence before men, but weep before the Almighty ?-solitary voices, which surround the earth with an universal harmony, and are united in heaven-wandering gleams which return, I know not to what mysterious star, perhaps to ancient Apollo's self, to descend again and again upon the earth, and nourish the divine and never-dying flame? If she produce no more great men, cannot she still produce good ones? Who can say that she shall not, in another generation, be a gentle and beneficent divinity, and occupy the throne of the doubt and despair by which ours is held fast? Who can say, that in some new moral code, in some new religious creed, disgust and sadness shall not be branded as vices; whilst love, hope, and reverence shall be rewarded as virtues ? * Before we can doom Poetry to death -before we can carry her on her bier--we must tear up from earth the last lingering flower of which a Genevieve makes her nosegays ! “For she, too, was a poet. Believe me, there are, in the depths of the most sombre ruins, among the ranks of the least fortunate, many existences which are wound up without having produced so little as a sonnet, and which are still glorious poems. “* * * * And this was the case with Genevieve! The frivolous art of imitating flowers had led her to examine her models, to love them, to seek in the study of nature a means of perfecting her intelligence. By degrees she became identified with nature, and every day, in the secret of her heart, eagerly perused the page spread wide before her eager gaze. She was then accustomed to live at a distance from all that surrounded her; her virtue was not, as some fancied, severe and savage; she was too calm in her innocence ever to seek her strength in fierce and defying maxims. Happy in her liberty and her daily occupations, an orphan, enriched by her calling beyond her desires, she was gracious and kind to her old playmates, afraid of appearing to them vain of her little stock of learning, and allowing herself to be amused by them. But she supported rather than sought such amusement; and if she never showed the least signs of disdain or weariness, she was not the less delighted to find herself alone in her small chamber, and to say her prayers beneath the moonlight, and breathed on by the jessamines round her casement!” * * It would be a pleasant task to extract further—whether from the gentle scenes in which André, innocent of meditated subtlety, nevertheless winds himself into the maiden's heart by sympathy and criticism in her pursuits—from the more lively passages in which the poetry of Genevieve is measured against the coarse common sense of Henriette, and the indolent submission of the son is contrasted with the exacting sordidness of his father. We must pass on, however, taking the opportunity to remark, as a special merit in the whole series of novels, the intimate familiarity which George Sand shows with the characteristics of the different classes of native society. No figure more entirely French ever tripped along the gilded galleries of Versailles than the old Marquise de Raimbault in “ Valentine," the sketch of whose alternate folly, frivolity, and maudlin piety is read like a page torn out of the Memoirs of Madame de Genlis. No wayfarer resting beneath the shadow of the peaked tourelles of some spacious and comfortless chateau, was ever more national in his outline and costume, than Marcasse the rat-catcher in "Mauprat," with his lean Quixotic figure and his sententious gravity. Nor have the characters in which George Sand is successful that fault so largely destructive of the reader's trustful intimacy with so many of the personages of contemporary French novels. They are not over-wrought; their passions develope themselves in simple and dramatic dialogues ; their action is well noted down without a stiff and trammeling minuteness; there is life in their repose. Well has she herself said that only “les demi talens sont toujours génés, vagues et mysterieux”—thoroughly has she mastered that canon of fictitious composition which declares, that the artist should no more fatigue by over-anxiety as to detail, than he should tantalize by dreaminess and indecision in his first conceptions. This dramatic mastery over character and costume, this power of extracting from every scene and every epoch its own peculiar and distinctive essence, reveals itself strongly and singularly in the “ Lettres d'un Voyageur," perhaps its author's most characteristic work-characteristic in its very absence of plan and termination. The struggles between the divine and the animal impulses, revealed in certain of the letters, the confessions of wasted affection and unsatisfied hopes, the passionate self-delusion which permits the author of Lelia to plead for it as an exclamation of her own agony, without inquiring how far the agony itself may or may not be condemned beyond appeal by nature and religion,-appear all the stranger and sadder from their being set in the midst of descriptions unsurpassed in their freshness and colour and beauty, or reveries taking the most graceful and loftiest excursions among the works of art, intellect or genius. It is impossible to exhibit this contrast in all its force. The following short passage but indicates the deso late restlessness of a mind wandering, as it were, over the face a of a deluged earth, cheered by no messenger bearing its olive branch as a token that the subsiding of the waters is at hand. “ I have been reading enormously during these last days. I say enormously, because during the last three years I have not got through so much as one octavo : and here have I, in one fortnight, swallowed and digested L’Eucharistie by the Abbé Gerbet, Madame de Staël's Reflections on Suicide, and Alfieri's Autobiography. The first I read by chance; the second from curiosity-wishing to see how that he-woman understood life; the third out of sympathy, some one having recommended it to me as sure to speak powerfully to my mind. “A sermon—a dissertation-a history. The story of Alfieri is like a novel-interesting, exciting, agitating. The catholicism of the Abbé has the limited solemnity, the inevitable fruitlessness of an ascetic book. Madame de Staël's treatise alone is what its author intended-a correct logical essay, commonplace in its thoughts, pedantic in its form, beau.. tiful in its style, and learned in its arrangement. That woman would have wearied me out. I prefer the conversation of Madame Dorval. I have found no other consolation in her essay than that Madame de Staël loved life; that she had a thousand reasons to cling to it; that she had a lot infinitely happier than mine, and a head infinitely stronger and more intelligent. As to the rest, her book has increased for me the attractions of suicide. When I meet a village schoolmaster in one of my journeys, he wearies me; but I take it patiently : he is in his calling. But if I meet an illustrious Doctor, and, hoping to receive good counsel from him, I consult him for the enlightenment of my doubts, and the relief of my anxieties, I should be more shocked and saddened than before, were he to tell me, in excellent phrases and well-chosen words, the same common places which the country-pedagogue had let off upon me in his kitchen-latin; the former did me the good of making me smile a little at his barbarisms—his earnestness amounted to the comic : the chilling barrenness of the doctor is only melancholy. It is the oak to which I had clung for salvation, and which snaps like a reed, letting me fall all the deeper in the abyss. L'Eucharistie is certainly a remarkable book in spite of its faults. I am glad I have read it; not that it has done me any good-it is too catholic for me, and these sectarian books do good but to a limited number--but because it has recalled to me the days of my youth, so devout, so tender, so credulous ! “ Alfieri is a man who delights me, and with whom I am almost in love. What I love is his pride ; what interests me is the terrible strise between his haughtiness and his weakness; what I admire are the unheard-of efforts he made to become a poet. Alas! here is one more who has suffered, detested life, bled and groaned (as he tells us) in the frenzy of suicide! and yet he, like all the rest, is comforted by a coral and bells ! He has known love, with its hideous disenchantments and regrets in which shame and contempt mingle, and the weariness of solitude, and the chill of disdain, and a sad clear-sightedness into all things..... except glory—the last bauble which saved him! “ To sum up, I must inform you that reading does me much more harm than good. I will wean myself from it as fast as possible. It increases my uncertainty of every truth, and my discouragement as to any future. All who have written the history of human evils, preach from the heights of calmness or forgetfulness. Sitting at ease on their peaceable rockinghorse, which has drawn them out of danger, they entertain me with the system, the creed, or the vanity which consoles them. One is devout, another savante : the great Alfieri makes tragedies. In the midst of their present well-being, they look at past distresses as tiny grains of sand, and consider mine to be nothing more, without dreaming that theirs were as mine are, mountains. They are delivered; 1, like Prometheus, am still bound, having only free my breast, for the nourishment of the vulture! Cruel that they are to smile so tranquilly! One over my agony pronounces that word of religious disdain, vanitas ! Another calls my anguish weakness, a third ignorance. "When I was not devout,' says one, 'I too was chained to this stone : be devout then, like me, and arise.' Am I dying? Madame de Staël bids me think of the great heroes of antiquity, and say some fine phrase concerning them. 'Nothing so consoling as rhetoric !' 'Are you weary of yourself?' exclaims Alfieri. 'Ah! how weary have I too been ! But Cleopatra delivered me!' Yes, I know it! You are all of you happy, virtuous, glorious! Every one calls to me, 'Raise thyself; be like us! Write, sing, love, pray!'-every one even to yourself, kind friend, who me to study the classifications of Linnæus! Masters and friends, have you nothing better than this to tell me? Will none of you lend a hand to this stone, and remove it from my bleeding and wasted limbs ? At least, if I must perish without help, repeat to me the grief of Jeremiah-the lamentations of Job. They, at least, were not pedants; they said openly, · Rottenness is in my bones, and the worms of the sepulchre have entered my flesh!'" It cannot surely be necessary to descant upon the unsubdued will, the misapplied intellectual acuteness, of which the foregoing passage offers but glimpses. To illustrate from these letters the brighter side of the contrast, so violently maintained throughout the whole of George Sand's works, is a more welcome task. Exquisite, for instance, is the description of the deserted house, in which the traveller describes himself as shut up, and studying the pregnant pages of Lavater; in the fresh yet remote fancies by which it is embroidered, reminding us of the best writing of Goëthe's singular correspondent, Bettina Brentano,—who resembled George Sand, too, it may be recollected, in her feminine intolerance of “ cette Staël !” Nor less delightful, from their |