adored by man when his heart is permitted to form its sole, its
impenetrable buckler!

After having blunted her chisel in polishing this statue, which, by its
majesty, its haughty disdain, its look of hopeless anguish, shadowed
by the frowning of the pure brows and by the long loose locks shivering
with electric life, reminds us of those antique cameos on which we still
admire the perfect features, the beautiful yet fatal brow, the haughty
smile of the Medusa, whose gaze paralyzed and stopped the pulses of the
human heart;--Madame Sand in vain sought another form for the expression
of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul. After having
draped this figure with the highest art, accumulating every species of
masculine greatness upon it in order to compensate for the highest
of all qualities which she repudiated for it, the grandeur of, "utter
self-abnegation for love," which the many-sided poet has placed in the
empyrean and called "the Eternal Feminine," (DAS EWIGWEIBLICHE,)--a
greatness which is love existing before any of its joys, surviving all
its sorrows;--after having caused Don Juan to be cursed, and a divine
hymn to be chanted to Desire by Lelia, who, as well as Don Juan,
had repulsed the only delight which crowns desire, the luxury of
self-abnegation,--after having fully revenged Elvira by the creation
of Stenio,--after having scorned man more than Don Juan had degraded
woman,--Madame Sand, in her LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR, depicts the shivering
palsy, the painful lethargy which seizes the artist, when, having
incorporated the emotion which inspired him in his work, his imagination
still remains under the domination of the insatiate idea without
being able to find another form in which to incarnate it. Such poetic
sufferings were well understood by Byron, when he makes Tasso shed his
most bitter tears, not for his chains, not for his physical sufferings,
not for the ignominy heaped upon him, but for his finished Epic, for the
ideal world created by his thought and now about to close its doors upon
him, and by thus expelling him from its enchanted realm, rendering him
at last sensible of the gloomy realities around him:--

"But this is o'er--my pleasant task is done:--
My long-sustaining friend of many years:
If I do blot thy final page with tears,
Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and