smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone--and so is my delight."

LAMENT OF TASSO.--BYRON.

At this epoch, Madame Sand often heard a musician, one of the friends
who had greeted Chopin with the most enthusiastic joy upon his arrival
at Paris, speak of him. She heard him praise his poetic genius even more
than his artistic talent. She was acquainted with his compositions,
and admired their graceful tenderness. She was struck by the amount of
emotion displayed in his poems, with the effusions of a heart so noble
and dignified. Some of the countrymen of Chopin spoke to her of the
women of their country, with the enthusiasm natural to them upon that
subject, an enthusiasm then very much increased by a remembrance of
the sublime sacrifices made by them during the last war. Through their
recitals and the poetic inspiration of the Polish artist, she perceived
an ideal of love which took the form of worship for woman. She thought
that guaranteed from dependence, preserved from inferiority, her role
might be like the fairy power of the Peri, that ethereal intelligence
and friend of man. Perhaps she did not fully understand what innumerable
links of suffering, of silence, of patience, of gentleness, of
indulgence, of courageous perseverance, had been necessary for the
formation of the worship for this imperious but resigned ideal,
beautiful indeed, but sad to behold, like those plants with the
rose-colored corollas, whose stems, intertwining and interlacing in a
network of long and numerous branches, give life to ruins; destined ever
to embellish decay, growing upon old walls and hiding only tottering
stones! Beautiful veils woven by beneficent Nature, in her ingenious and
inexhaustible richness, to cover the constant decay of human things!

As Madame Sand perceived that this artist, in place of giving body to
his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his thoughts by the
creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced the contour of his works,
and, had it been necessary, could have elevated his architecture itself
from the soil, to suspend it, like the floating palaces of the Fata
Morgana, in the fleecy clouds, through his aerial forms of almost
impalpable buoyancy, she was more and more attracted by that mystic
ideal which she perceived glowing within them. Though her arm was
powerful enough to have sculptured the round shield, her hand was
d