e the only
real joys of my life," she repeats again and again.

_Lelia_, begun immediately after _Valentine_ was published in the spring
of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a
sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new
direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile
criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic
morality--enhancing her celebrity not a little.

_Lelia_, a lyrical novel--an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose,
stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she
takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions
of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude.
"Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life
than is _Lelia_. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic
of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the
paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a
child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and
what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so
popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned that _Lelia_
will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will
not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however
weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on
the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.

_Lelia_, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who
one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the
splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried
and hapless lover, Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own
accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine
precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman
convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed,
made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest,
Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and
neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears
of the present generation.

It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and
executed with the _sans gene_ of an improvisatore. For those who admire
the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation
remains unabated. Into _Lelia_, she owns, she put more of her