d de Musset, whose
intimate friendship with the author is historic.]

"I admire those men," said Lelia, "and would like to be the least
among them. But what will those shepherds bearing a star on their
brows be able to do before the huge monster of the Apocalypse--before
that immense and terrible figure outlined in the foreground of all the
prophets' pictures? That woman, as pale and beautiful as vice--that
great harlot of nations, decked with the wealth of the East, and
bestriding a hydra belching forth rivers of poison on all human
pathways--is Civilization; is humanity demoralized by luxury and
science; is the torrent of venom which will swallow up all virtue, all
hope of regeneration."

"O Lelia!" exclaimed the poet, struck by superstition, "are not you
that terrible and unhappy fantom? How many times this fear has taken
possession of my dreams! How many times you have appeared to me as the
type of the unspeakable agony to which the spirit of inquiry has
driven man! With your beauty and your sadness, your weariness and your
skepticism, do you not personify the excess of sorrow produced by the
abuse of thought? Have you not given up, and as it were prostituted,
that moral power, so highly developed by what art, poetry, and science
have done for it, to every new impression and error? Instead of
clinging faithfully and prudently to the simple creed of your fathers,
and to the instinctive indifference God has implanted in man for his
peace and preservation; instead of confining yourself to a pious life
free from vain show, you have abandoned yourself to all the seductions
of ambitious philosophy. You have cast yourself into the torrent of
civilization rising to destroy, and which by dashing along too swiftly
has ruined the scarcely laid foundations of the future. And because
you have delayed the work of centuries for a few days, you think you
have shattered the hourglass of Eternity. There is much pride in this
grief, Lelia! But God will make this billow of stormy centuries, that
for him are but a drop in the ocean, float by. The devouring hydra
will perish for lack of food; and from its world-covering corpse a new
race will issue, stronger and more patient than the old."

"You see far into the future, Stenio! You personify Nature for me, and
are her unspotted child. You have not yet blunted your faculties: you
believe yourself immortal because you feel yourself young and like
that untilled valley now blooming in pri