ooks, the trees, the flowers, that make so beautiful a
background for youthful loves and hopes. Perhaps we could wish sometimes
that she were a little less frank. We miss a touch of delicacy in
this nature that was so strong and self-poised. We are sorry that she
dismissed La Blancherie quite so theatrically. There is a trace too much
of consciousness in her fine self-analysis, perhaps a little vanity, and
we half suspect that her unchildlike penetration and precocity of
motive was sometimes the reflection of an afterthought. But it is to
be remembered that, even in childhood, she had lived in such close
companionship with the heroes and moralists of the past that their
sentiments had become her own. She doubtless posed a little to
herself, as well as to the world, but her frankness was a part of that
uncompromising truthfulness which scorned disguises of any sort, and led
her to paint faults and virtues alike.

Family sorrows--the death of the mother whom she adored, and the
unworthiness of her father--combined to change the current of her free
and happy life, and to deepen a natural vein of melancholy. In her
loneliness of soul the convent seemed to offer itself as the sole haven
of peace and rest. The child, who loved Fenelon, and dreamed over the
lives of the saints, had in her much of the stuff out of which mystics
and fanatics are made. Her ardent soul was raised to ecstasy by the
stately ceremonial of the Church; her imagination was captivated by its
majestic music, its mystery, its solemnity, and she was wont to spend
hours in rapt meditation. But her strong fund of good sense, her firm
reason fortified by wide and solid reading, together with her habits of
close observation and analysis, saved her from falling a victim to
her own emotional needs, or to chimeras of any sort. She had drawn her
mental nourishment too long from Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, the
English philosophers, and classic historians, to become permanently a
prey to exaggerated sensibilities, though it was the same temperament
fired by a sense of human inequality and wrong, that swept her at last
along the road that led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation
of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her
childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its
ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved
illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage of reason.

It may be n