of time, there is a slight but perceptible taste of iron in the water.
‘George Sand disappoints me, as almost all beings have, especially since I have been brought close to her person by the Lettres d'un Voyageur. Her remarks on Lavater seem really shallow, and hasty, à la mode du genre feménin. No self-ruling Aspasia she, but a frail woman mourning over a lot. Any peculiarity in her destiny seems accidental. She is forced to this and that, to earn her bread forsooth!
‘Yet her style, — with what a deeply smouldering fire it burns! — not vehement, but intense, like Jean Jacques.’
‘“La harpe tremble encore, et la flûte soupire.”
‘Sometimes we doubt this, and think the music has finally ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the parade-ground of social life. The ear grows dull.
‘“Faith asks her daily bread,
And Fancy is no longer fed.”
‘So materialistic is the course of common life, that we ask daily new Messiahs from literature and art, to turn us from the Pharisaic observance of law, to the baptism of spirit. But stars arise upon our murky sky, and the flute soupire from the quarter where we least expect it.
‘La jeune France! I had not believed in this youthful pretender. I thought she had no pure blood in her veins, no aristocratic features in her face, no natural grace in her gait. I thought her an illegitimate
