sickness threw no cloud over
her intellect; "I am now," she said, "what I have ever been--sad, yet
vivacious;" but it displayed the moral beauties of her character in a
more striking light. She was kind, patient, and devout. Her sleepless
nights were spent in prayer. Existence no longer appeared to her in
its gayest colors. "Life," she said, "resembles Gobelin tapestry; you
do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you turn it, the
threads are visible. The mystery of existence is the connection
between our faults and our misfortunes. I never committed an error
that was not the cause of a disaster." Yet she left life with regret,
though death possessed for her no terrors. "I shall meet my father on
the other side," she said, "and my daughter will ere long rejoin me."
"I think," said she, one day, as if waking from a dream, "I think I
know what the passage from life to death is; and I am convinced that
the goodness of God makes it easy; our thoughts become confused, and
the pain is not great." She died with the utmost composure, at Paris,
July, 1817.

Her husband survived her but a few months. "Grief put a period to his
already precarious existence. He withdrew from Paris, to die beneath
the beautiful sky of Provence, and there breathed his last sighs in
the arms of his brother."

The chief works of Madame de Stael, and her peculiarities as an
author, have already been spoken of. One work, published after her
death, and the most powerful of all, remains to be mentioned. In the
"Considerations on the French Revolution," she sought to blend the
memoir with the philosophical history. The faults are what might have
been expected. The details, too minute for the one, are too scanty for
the other. In the selection of these she was biased by her personal
feelings, but to a degree far less than was to be anticipated. Her
feelings were warm and excitable; she had lived in the midst of the
events of which she speaks; she had herself been an actor, and her
father had borne a conspicuous part, in them; indeed, one grand
purpose of the work is to exculpate him. That she should, under these
disqualifying circumstances, have produced a work so temperate, and on
the whole so impartial--one that exhibits such philosophical depth and
comprehensiveness of vision--excites in us wonder and admiration. But
it is not as a history that the work is interesting and valuable. It
is that it exhibits to us the impressions made by the grea