t of any other person. She is glad to
introduce Robert Browning as the author of "Bells and Pomegranates" to
the American public. Mrs. Browning was then Miss Barrett, in regard of
whom Margaret rejoices that her task is "mainly to express a cordial
admiration!" and says that she "cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigor
and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience, and command
of classic allusion, above any female writer the world has yet known."
In those poems of hers which emulate Milton and Dante "her success is
far below what we find in the poems of feeling and experience; for she
has the vision of a great poet, but little in proportion of his classic
power."

Margaret has much to say concerning George Sand, and under various
heads. In her work on Woman, she gives the _rationale_ of her strange
and anomalous appearance, and is at once very just and very tender in
her judgments.

George Sand was then in the full bloom of her reputation. The light and
the shade of her character, as known to the public, were at the height
of their contrast. To the literary merit of her work was added the
interest of a mysterious personality, which rebelled against the limits
of sex, and, not content to be either man or woman, touched with a new
and strange protest the imagination of the time.

The inexorable progress of events has changed this, with so much else.
Youth, beauty, sex, all imperial in their day, are discrowned by the
dusty hand of Time, and ranged in the gallery of the things that were.
George Sand's volumes still glow and sparkle on the bookshelf; but
George Sand's personality and her passions are dim visions of the past,
and touch us no longer. When Margaret wrote of her, the woman was at the
zenith of her power, and the intoxication of her influence was so great
that a calm judgment concerning it was difficult. Like a wild Bacchante,
she led her chorus of bold spirits through the formal ways of French
society, which in her view were bristling with pruriency and veiled with
hypocrisy. Like Margaret's, her cry was, "Truth at all hazards!" But
hers was not the ideal truth which Margaret followed so zealously. "So
vile are men, so weak are women, so ruthless is passion," were the
utterances of her sincerity. Mistress of the revels, she did indeed
command a new unmasking at the banquet, thoughtless of the risk of
profaning innocent imaginations with sad facts which they had no need to
know, and which, shown by