incerity
of the hearts which surround us, and see but the allegorical symbols of
human affections in the antique train of the beautiful Canephoroe, who
carried the fragile and perfumed flowers to adorn some hapless victim
for the altar!

Chopin spoke frequently and almost by preference of Madame Sand, without
bitterness or recrimination. Tears always filled his eyes when he named
her; but with a kind of bitter sweetness he gave himself up to the
memories of past days, alas, now. He stripped of their manifold
significance! In spite of the many subterfuges employed by his friends
to entice him from dwelling upon remembrances which always brought
dangerous excitement with them, he loved to return to them; as if
through the same feelings which had once reanimated his life, he now
wished to destroy it, sedulously stifling its powers through the vapor
of this subtle poison. His last pleasure seemed to be the memory of the
blasting of his last hope; he treasured the bitter knowledge that under
this fatal spell his life was ebbing fast away. All attempts to fix
his attention upon other objects were made in vain, he refused to be
comforted and would constantly speak of the one engrossing subject. Even
if he had ceased to speak of it, would he not always have thought of it?
He seemed to inhale the poison rapidly and eagerly, that he might thus
shorten the time in which he would be forced to breathe it!

Although the exceeding fragility of his physical constitution might
not have allowed him, under any circumstances, to have lingered long
on earth, yet at least he might have been spared the bitter sufferings
which clouded his last hours! With a tender and ardent soul, though
exacting through its fastidiousness and excessive delicacy, he could not
live unless surrounded by the radiant phantoms he had himself evoked;
he could not expel the profound sorrow which his heart cherished as
the sole remaining fragment of the happy past. He was another great
and illustrious victim to the transitory attachments occurring between
persons of different character, who, experiencing a surprise full of
delight in their first sudden meeting, mistake it for a durable feeling,
and build hopes and illusions upon it which can never be realized. It is
always the nature the most deeply moved, the most absolute in its hopes
and attachments, for which all transplantation is impossible, which is
destroyed and mined in the painful awakening from the absorbi