ance and rapture of desire--is held by no
conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her,
the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers.
Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination.
She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable,
alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable
path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers
in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are
common to us all.

And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country
of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to
the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has
brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations.
This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and
charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights.
How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted
and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain,
and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God,
by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of
nature, which is over nature, can put any trust. No evolution, no system
of development, can explain Jeanne. There is but one of her and no more
in all the astonished world.

With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and
beautiful name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.
Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble,
fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest inspirations
of the mediaeval mind, yet she is inherently French, though France
scarcely was in her time: and national, though as yet there were rather
the elements of a nation than any indivisible People in that great
country. Was not she herself one of the strongest and purest threads
of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it irrevocably,
beneficially, into one?

It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of French
territory that this national deliverer came. It is a commonplace that
a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own country against the
other from which but a line divides him in fact, and scarcely so much
in race--than the calmer inhabitant of the midland country who knows no
such press o