one so beautiful touched and gratified the woman of genius. Still, this
intimacy was not unmixed with bitterness for Madame de Stael. But it
troubled only her own heart, not the common friendship. She continually
contrasted Madame Recamier's beauty with her own plain appearance, her
friend's power of fascination with her own lesser faculty of
interesting, and she repeatedly declared that Madame Recamier was the
most enviable of human beings. But in comparing the lives of the two, as
they now appear to us, Madame de Stael seems the more fortunate. If her
married life was uncongenial, she had children to love and cherish, to
whom she was fondly attached. Madame Recamier was far more isolated.
Years had made her entirely independent of her husband, and she had no
children upon whom to lavish the wealth of her affection. Her mother's
death left her comparatively alone in the world, for she had neither
brother nor sister, and her father seems to have had but little hold on
her heart, all her love being lavished on her mother. She had a host of
friends, it is true, but the closest friendship is but a poor substitute
for the natural ties of affection. Both these women sighed for what they
had not. The one yearned for love, the other for the liberty of loving.
Madame Recamier was dependent for her enjoyments on society, while
Madame de Stael had rich and manifold resources within herself, which no
caprice of friends could materially affect, and no reverse of fortune
impair. Her poetic imagination and creative thought were inexhaustible
treasures. Solitude could never be irksome to her. Her genius brought
with it an inestimable blessing. It gave her a purpose in
life,--consequently she was never in want of occupation; and if at
intervals she bitterly felt that heart-loneliness which Mrs. Browning
has so touchingly expressed in verse,--

"'My father!'--thou hast knowledge, only thou!
How dreary 't is for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires,
And hear the nations praising them far off,
Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
Which could not beat so in the verse without
Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried because there's none to ask
The reason they grew moist,"--

in the excitement and ardor of composition such feelings slumbered,
while in the honest and pure satisfaction of work well done they were
fo