adored him, and clung to him through life with peculiar tenderness and devotion, which he appreciated and repaid.  Before she was twenty she wrote poetry as a matter of course.  Most girls do,—­I mean those who are bright and sentimental; still, she produced but indifferent work, like Cicero when he was young, and soon dropped rhyme forever for the greater freedom of prose, into which she poured from the first all the wealth of her poetic soul.  She was a poet, disdaining measure, but exquisite in rhythm,—­for nothing can be more musical than her style.

As remarked in the lecture on Madame Recamier, it is seldom that people acquire the art of conversation till middle life, when the mind is enriched and confidence is gained.  The great conversational powers of Johnson, Burke, Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wilkes, Garrick, Walpole, Sydney Smith, were most remarkable in their later years, after they had read everything and seen everybody.  But Madame de Stael was brilliant in conversation from her youth.  She was the delight of every circle, the admiration of the most gifted men,—­not for her beauty, for she was not considered beautiful, but for her wit, her vivacity, her repartee, her animated and sympathetic face, her electrical power; for she could kindle, inspire, instruct, or bewitch.  She played, she sang, she discoursed on everything,—­a priestess, a sibyl, full of inspiration, listened to as an oracle or an idol.  “To hear her,” says Sismondi, “one would have said that she was the experience of many souls mingled into one, I looked and listened with transport.  I discovered in her features a charm superior to beauty; and if I do not hear her words, yet her tones, her gestures, and her looks convey to me her meaning.”  It is said that though her features were not beautiful her eyes were remarkable,—­large, dark, lustrous, animated, flashing, confiding, and bathed in light.  They were truly the windows of her soul; and it was her soul, even more than her intellect, which made her so interesting and so great.  I think that intellect without soul is rather repulsive than otherwise, is cold, critical, arrogant, cynical,—­something from which we flee, since we find no sympathy and sometimes no toleration from it.  The soul of Madame de Stael immeasurably towered above her intellect, great as that was, and gave her eloquence, fervor, sincerity, poetry,—­intensified her genius, and made her irresistible.

It was this combination of wit, sympathy, and conversational talent which made Madame de Stael so inordinately fond of society,—­to satisfy longings and cravings that neither Nature nor books nor home could fully meet.  With all her genius and learning she was a restless woman; and even friendship, for which she had a great capacity, could not bind her, or confine her long to any one place but Paris, which was to her the world,—­not for its shops, or fashions, or churches, or museums and picture-galleries, or historical monuments and memories, but for those