inexpressible sweetness of
self-forgetful love, to the tragic notes or agony and despair. There are
many brilliant passages in them, many flashes of profound thought, many
vivid traits of the people about her; but they are, before all, the
record of a soul that is rapidly burning out its casket.

"I prefer my misery to all that the world calls happiness or pleasure,"
she writes. "I shall die of it, perhaps, but that is better than never
to have lived."

"I have no more the strength to love," she says again; "my soul fatigues
me, torments me; I am no more sustained by anything. I have every day a
fever; and my physician, who is not the most skillful of men, repeats
to me without ceasing that I am consumed by chagrin, that my pulse, my
respiration, announce an active grief, and he always goes out saying,
'We have no cure for the soul.'"

"Adieu, my friend," were her last words to him. "If I ever return to
life I shall still love to employ it in loving you; but there is no more
time."

One could almost wish that these letters had never come to light. A
single grand passion has always a strong hold upon the imagination and
the sympathies, but two passions contending for the mastery verge
upon something quite the reverse of heroic. The note of heart-breaking
despair is tragic enough, but there is a touch of comedy behind it.
Though her words have the fire, the devotion, the abandon of Heloise,
they leave a certain sense of disproportion. One is inclined to wonder
if they do not overtop the feeling.

D'Alembert was her truest mourner, and fell into a profound melancholy
after her death. "Yes," he said to Marmontel, "she was changed, but I
was not; she no longer lived for me, but I ever lived for her. Since she
is no more, I know not why I exist. Ah! Why have I not still to suffer
those moments of bitterness that she knew so well how to sweeten and
make me forget? Do you remember the happy evenings we passed together?
Now what have I left? I return home, and instead of herself I find only
her shade. This lodging at the Louvre is itself a tomb, which I never
enter but with horror." To this "shade" he wrote two expressive and
well-considered eulogies, which paint in pathetic words the perfections
of his friend and his own desolation. "Adieu, adieu, my dear Julie,"
says the heartbroken philosopher; "for these eyes which I should like to
close forever fill with tears in tracing these last lines, and I see
no more the paper o