thus blessed cannot live forever! Then I thought, No, it is better
as it is. They were happy. They drained the best cup existence can
offer. When the world was becoming an infirmary, and the song of
the grasshopper a burden, it was meet that they should sleep.
Those only are to be pitied who die without the experience of
affection.

This attempt to revive the story and brighten the urn of the Ladies
of Llangollen may suggest that friendship lies within the province of
women as much as within the province of men; that there are pairs of
feminine friends as worthy of fame as any of the masculine couples
set by classic literature in the empyrean of humanity; that uncommon
love clothes the lives of its subjects with the interest of unfading
romance; that the true dignity, happiness, and peace of women and of
men, too--are to be found rather in the quiet region of personal
culture, and the affections, than in the arena of ambitious
publicity. Mrs. Thrale and Fanny Burney were every thing to each
other for a long time. But, on the marriage of the former with Mr.
Piozzi, a breach occurred, which was never repaired. Four years after
this coldness, Fanny writes in her diary, "Oh, little does she know
how tenderly, at this moment, I could run into her arms, so often
opened to receive me with a cordiality I believed inalienable." Two
years after that, Mrs. Piozzi writes in her diary, "I met Miss Burney
at an assembly last night. She appeared most fondly rejoiced in good
time I answered with ease and coldness, but in exceeding good humor;
and all ended, as it should do, with perfect indifference." Thirty-
one years later still, Fanny enters in her diary this brief record:
"I have just lost my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend,
Mrs. Thrale Piozzi."

The young Bettine Brentano, several years before her acquaintance
with Goethe, was placed temporarily in the house of a female
religious order to pursue her studies. There she soon made the
acquaintance of a canoness named Guenderode, considerably older than
herself, though still young, with rare mental endowments and romantic
affections. The cultivated intellect, spirituality, and mystic
melancholy of Guenderode, under her singularly attractive features and
calm demeanor, drew the impassioned and redundant Bettine to her by
an irresistible bond. Their companionship ripened into romantic
friendship. Their letters, collected and published by the survivor,
compose one of th