od as witness, priest,
and wedding-guest--then all prudery will be destroyed; there will be
espousals everywhere, and we shall rise the same as the birds to the
grandeur of nature. My criticism on books of the sort of George Sand's
has then no value except in the vulgar order of things past, and
therefore I trust she will not be offended by it. The admiration I
profess for her ought to make her excuse these remarks, which have
their origin in the infelicity of my age. Once I should have been more
carried away by the Muses. Those daughters of heaven were in times
past my lovely mistresses, now they are only my ancient friends. At
evening they kept me company by the fireside, but they soon depart;
for I go to bed early, and then they hasten to take their places
around the hearth-stone of Madame Sand.

Without doubt Madame Sand will in this path prove her intellectual
omnipotence, but yet she will please less, because she will be less
original. She will fancy she augments her power by venturing into the
depths of these reveries, beneath which we deplorable common mortals
are buried, and she will be mistaken. In fact she is much superior
to this extravagance, this vagueness, this presumptuous balderdash.
At the same time that a person endowed with a rare but too flexible
faculty, should be guarded against follies of the higher order, he
ought also to be warned that fantastic compositions, subjective or
intimate, painting (so runs the jargon) are restricted; that their
course is in youth; that its springs are drying up every instant, and
that after a number of productions the writer finishes with nothing
but weak repetitions.

Is it very likely that Madame Sand will always find the same charm
in what she now composes? Will not the merit and the enthusiasm of
twenty lose their value in her mind as the works of my first days are
depreciated in mine? There is nothing changeless except the labors of
the antique muse, and they are sustained by a nobility of manners, a
beauty of language, and a majesty of sentiments, which belong to the
entire human species. The fourth book of the Eneid remains forever
exposed to the admiration of men because it is suspended in heaven.
The ships bearing the founder of the Roman Empire,--Dido, the
foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after having announced
Hannibal:

Exoriare aliquis nostius exossibus ulta.--

Love causing the rivality of Rome and Carthage to leap from the flame
of his t