main what I always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet."

This, dearest, I say and say; and write down now lest you have forgotten it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after death! -I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence; yet I wish it so much-to exist again outside all this failure of my life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope, now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say-Send him these, it will be almost like living again; for surely you will love me again when you see how much I have sufferedand suffered because I would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading this, that there is bright sunlight streaming over my paper as I write?

LETTER LXVII.

Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received? Dearest, I trust those I send reach you; I send them, wishing till I grow weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to you; and I am glad of that weariness-it seems to be some virtue that has gone out of me. If all my body could go

out in the effort, I think I should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at last.

I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do that!

Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no emptying the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train; children and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I have many thoughts now born of my love for you, that never came when we were together—grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!

If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life); still if you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want, to know something of the life in between-I could put these letters that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day have I been truly, that is to say willingly, out of your heart. When Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes him to see their child, which till then he had never seen-and its likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to you in all that I leave here written?

If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be sent to you. If not I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that it will not reach you.

Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things set ghosts to walk; mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a ghost it will take your shape, not mine, dearest; for it will be "as trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth. Browning did not know that. Some one else, not Browning, has worded it for us; a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country that has lost him, and there "the traveller, marvelling why, halts on the bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts of hatred must be quite different; these bring fear, and those none. Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.

How strange that when one has suffered most, it is the poets (those who are supposed to sing) who best express things for us. Yet singing is the thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke up to find itself full of tune, it was mine; now you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied it dry; and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I think it is their cruelty that appeals to me;they can sing of grief! 0, hard hearts!

Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have suddenly become wide open to the night-sounds outside. A nightjar is making its beautiful burr in the stillness, and there are things going away and away, telling me the whereabouts of life, like points on a map made for the ear, You, too, are somewhere outside, making no sound; and listening for you I heard these. It

seemed as if my brain had all at once opened and caught a new sense. Are you there? This is one of those things which drop to us with no present meaning; yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live.

Good-night! At your head, at your feet, is there any room for me to-night, Beloved?

LETTER LXVIII.

Dearest:-The thought keeps troubling me how to give myself to you most, if you should ever come back for me when I am no longer here. These poor letters are all that I can leave; will they tell you enough of my heart?

Oh, into that, wish any wish that you like, and it is there already! My heart, dearest, only moves in the wish to be what you desire.

Yet I am conscious that I cannot give unless you shall choose to take; and though I write myself down each day your willing slave, I cry my wares in a market where there is no bidder to hear me.

Dearest, though my whole life is yours, it is little you know of it. My wish would be to have every year of my life blessed by your consciousness of it. Barely a year of me is all that you have, truly, to remember; though I think five summers at least came to flower, and withered in that one.

I wish you knew my whole life; I cannot tell it; it was too full of infinitely small things. Yet what I can remember I would like to tell now; so that some day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may here and there be warmed long after its death by your knowledge coming to it and discovering in it more than you knew before.

How I long, dearest, that what I write may look up some day and meet your eye! Beloved, then, however faded the ink may have grown, I think

the spirit of my love will remain fresh in it; I kiss you on the lips with every word. The thought of good-bye is never to enter here; it is A reviderci forever and ever;-"Love, love," aud "meet again!"-the words we put into the thrush's song on a day you will remember that all the world for us was a garden.

Dearest, what I can tell you of older days-little things they must be-I will; and I know that if you ever come to value them at all, their littleness will make them doubly welcome;-just as to know that you were once called a "gallous young hound" by people whom

you plagued when a boy, was to me a darling discovery; all at once I caught my childhood's imaginary comrade to my young spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and eyes.

Good night, good night! To-morrow I will find you some earliest memory; the dew of Hermon be on it when you come to it-if ever! Oh, Beloved, could you see into my heart now, or I into yours, time would grow to nothing for us; and my childhood would stay unwritten!

From far and near I gather my thoughts of you for the kiss I cannot give. Good night, dearest.

There is no more dazzling figure in modern European history than Madame de Staël. The daughter of Necker and the Revolution, she lives to see the new condition of society which is ushered in by the battle of Waterloo. She is the connecting link between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brought up in an age when women influence greatly indeed, but influence exclusively from their own homes and Salons, she runs about Europe always talking and always writing, carrying on an immortal warfare with Bonaparte the newest of new women, as she is certainly the cleverest and the most extraordinary.

She makes for herself a life which the concisest of encyclopædists and biographers seem unable to compress into the usual half column. She plunges into politics. She is stateswoman, novelist, playwriter, actress, metaphysician, patriot, intriguer, musician, philosopher. What is she not? As a Salonnière her Salon is nothing. It is

only its mistress who counts. Its habitués are there, not to talk with each other, but to listen to her. In the other Salons it is the men who make history. In this, it is the woman who whispers in their ear, who suggests this, proposes that, and makes them say at the Tribunat to-morrow what she thinks in her rooms to-night. So that Napoleon says, "Ce n'est point un salon, c'est un club"-and exiles her.

Born in Paris April 22, 1766, Germaine is almost from the first a cause of disagreement between the parents who love her. Papa is so gay, and mamma so strict! The bright, ugly, black-eyed baby distracts M. Necker with her infant vivacity from the great cares of his position. He is the best of playfellows. At what absurd age does a little woman discover that one admires her, and finds her small sayings laughable, and her small ways charming? When her mother receives, Germaine sits by her side on a very straight-backed little chair (Ma

dame thinks straight-backed chairs and uncomfortableness in themselves virtuous and regenerating to the soul) and listens with a very keen little mind, which no doubt takes in much more than that righteous mother fancies, to the most brilliant conversation of an age gorgeous in its setting.

All the guests speak to the little girl. Here are Grimm, Raynal, Thomas, Marmontel, who especially love to draw her out. Be sure Germaine replies to them with a perfect confidence. It is not, indeed, a very good bringing up for a small person naturally not a little vain.

She is still quite a child when she is writing to her mother:

"My Dear Mamma,-I want to write to you. My heart is drawn tight; I am sad, and in this large house I see now only a desert."

And again:

"Let me kiss you a thousand times, and press you to a heart that belongs only to you and papa."

Before the practical English mind condemns the letter-writer as an affected little poseuse, it should remember that Germaine is a French child, and that when she is no longer a child she never knows an emotion-and she knows many and passionate oneswithout talking or writing about it.

Some painter should put on canvas that garden scene at St. Ouen, where she is sent as a girl to recover her health after too much brain work, and where, with a little Mademoiselle Huber, she amuses herself by declaiming tragic verses, and reciting plays and poems, dressed in white like a wood nymph. She is not at all pretty. She is never pretty. She has rather coarse features, and a certain bold brilliancy of expression, not at all attractive. But then, every fresh feeling re-creates her face. She is at this time divinely young. And her

ugliness is now, as later, so clever that it interests more than any placid beauty.

She has written tragedies before she is grown up. She has a mind that dares anything. She has already begun to idolize her father with that idolatry which only dies at her death. She herself says that the enlèvement of Richardson's "Clarissa" is one of the events of her childhood; and might well exclaim with the heroine of another novel, "Il me faut des émotions!" "That which amused her was that which made her weep," writes Mademoiselle Huber. There is no other girl in the world-not even another French girl-who is at sixteen or seventeen years old such a brilliant compound of genius, vanity, inspiration, sentiment and impulse, as Germaine Necker.

The richest heiress in France is just twenty when she marries the Baron de Staël-Holstein, Swedish ambassador in Paris. He is much older than herself. He is nobody. He only lends his wife a name which she is to render immortal. They separate pretty soon without making any extraordinary fuss about the parting. A friend of De Staël's says that he is always "sincerely attached to his charming wife, although she shows entire indifference to him." That may be so. But perhaps the Baron finds, with Lamartine, that "celebrity is like a fire which burns when one is close to it, and gives light when one is away from it. Happy he who is far from a woman's glory!"

With her marriage begins that torrent of events which forms Madame's life.

She is still a very young wife when the long smouldering misery of her country breaks into flame. She has an absorbing passion for liberty. She has already published her "Letters on the Works and Character of Jean Jacques Rousseau," which are themselves a

clever girl's passionate hero-worship for the man "without whom," says Napoleon, "there would have been no revolution in France." Before the meeting of the States-General-that "baptism day of democracy," "the extreme unction day of feudalism"-she watches from a window the great procession of twelve hundred deputies with an exultant joy. It remains for another woman, much less brilliant and furtherseeing, to say, "Do not rejoice; out of this day will arrive frightful disasters to France and to us."

Madame is with her father at his disgrace and at his recall to power. It is the Millennium-it is the Golden Age-it is Utopia! And to-day she is at Versailles and the great Insurrection of Women. As soon as possible after the birth of her son in the dramatic August of 1790, she joins her parents at Coppet. But, "I have all Switzerland in a magnificent horror," she writes, and rushes back to Paris.

It is supremely characteristic of her now and always that she should find anything better than inaction. She must be moving, doing, to the fore. A Revolution-and I not in it? Social Paris still sociable though its streets run with blood-and I not there to talk? There is no human face that expresses such an extraordinary degree of vitality and energy as Madame de Staël's. She arrives in her dearest capital, and starts there the first, the most brilliant and the most influential of her Salons, the Salon of the Revolution.

It is pre-eminently of French society that it can be said that it is at its liveliest and wittiest in a time of anarchy and confusion. If one is French one must amuse oneself. And if, without, there is tragedy and ruin, why, within, only the more need to distract one's thoughts. In this Salon, besides, there is not only laughter. Here meet the old nobility and the men of the

tiers états. The habitués are Talleyrand, Barnave, Chénier, Lafayette, Lally Tollendal, Narbonne and Benjamin Constant. Madame does not lead the conversation gently, imperceptibly, as did the Salonnières of those old Salons of that old world, gone forever. Her personality dominates the room. Those flashing black eyes, those full, passionate lips, could never belong to a woman content to be merely tender and charming. She wants to make felt her power and the genius of which she is supremely conscious-and can but be conscious. She talks politics in a fire of enthusiasm. She writes "the most important part of Talleyrand's Report on Public Instruction in 1791," and now is imploring Barras, the only member of the Directoire admitted here, to spare one or another victim of that insatiable monster, universal anarchy.

She

Before long she is saving her friends by her own exertions. She hides Narbonne in her house, and, with that infinite wit and resource that never desert her, prevents the officials from searching it. If she ever is, as Sismondi says, "excessivement poltronne," she certainly does not show it now. has instead the mettle and pluck of a war horse. On that awful day of the Massacre of September she tries to escape to Coppet. She is stopped and taken to the Hôtel de Ville, escorted by that mob who the next day murder the Lamballe with nameless atrocities. The carriage is three hours in getting through the streets. The people goaded to madness by its aristocratic appearance, howl blasphemies and death. The gendarmes won't help her, except one, who is with her in the carriage, and falls under the potent charm of her cleverness, and promises to save her with his life. In the Hôtel de Ville she is brought before Robespierre. Manuel, the "procureur of the Commune" and her friend, finds her there, and after many hours of waiting con