y be truly said that she never cherished a hatred.

The life of Mme. de Stael was in the world. She embodied the French
spirit; she could not conceive of happiness in a secluded existence; a
theater and an audience were needed to call out her best talents. She
could not even bear her griefs alone. The world was taken into her
confidence. She demanded its sympathy. She chanted exquisite requiems
over her dead hopes and her lost illusions, but she chanted them in
costume, never quite forgetting that her role was a heroic one. She
added, however, to the gifts of an improvisatrice something infinitely
higher and deeper. There was no problem with which she was not ready to
deal. She felt the pulse beats in the great heart of humanity, and her
tongue, her pen, her purse, and her influence were ever at the bidding
of the unfortunate. She traversed all fields of thought, from the
pleasant regions of poetry and romance to the highest altitudes of
philosophy. We may note the drift of her ardent and imaginative nature
in the youthful tales into which she wove her romantic dreams, her
fancied griefs, her inward struggles, and her tears. In the pages
of "Corinne" we read the poetry, the sensibility, the passion, the
melancholy, the thought of a matured woman whose youth of the soul
neither sorrow nor experience could destroy. We may divine the direction
of her sympathies, and the fountain of her inspiration, in her letters
on Rousseau, written at twenty, and foreshadowing her own attitude
towards the theories which appealed so powerfully to the generous
spirits of the century. We may follow the active and scholarly workings
of her versatile intellect in her pregnant thoughts on literature,
on the passions, on the Revolution; or measure the clearness of
her insight, the depth of her penetration, the catholicity of her
sympathies, and the breadth of her intelligence in her profound and
masterly, if not always accurate, studies of Germany. The consideration
of all this pertains to a critical estimate of her character and genius
which cannot be attempted here.

It has grown to be somewhat the fashion to depreciate the literary work
of Mme. de Stael. Measured by present standards she leaves something
to be desired in logical precision; she had not the exactness of
the critical scholar, nor the simplicity of the careful artist; the
luxuriance of her language often obscures her thought. She is talking
still, and her written words have the