Thus did Milton, in his transcendent epic, show how a Paradise was regained when woman gave her generous sympathy to man, and reproduced for all coming ages the image of Spiritual Love,—­the inamorata of Dante and Petrarch, the inspired and consoling guide.

But the muse of the poets, even when sanctified by Christianity, never sang such an immortal love as the Middle Ages in sober prose have handed down in the history of Heloise,—­the struggle between the two Venuses of Socrates, and the final victory of Urania, though not till after the temporary triumph of Polyhymnia,—­the inamorata of earth clad in the vestments of a sanctified recluse, and purified by the chastisements of Heaven.  “Saint Theresa dies longing to join her divine spouse; but Saint Theresa is only a Heloise looking towards heaven.”  Heloise has an earthly idol; but her devotion has in it all the elements of a supernatural fervor,—­the crucifixion of self in the glory of him she adored.  He was not worthy of her idolatry; but she thought that he was.  Admiration for genius exalted sentiment into adoration, and imagination invested the object of love with qualities superhuman.

Nations do not spontaneously keep alive the memory of those who have disgraced them.  It is their heroes and heroines whose praises they sing,—­those only who have shone in the radiance of genius and virtue.  They forget defects, if these are counterbalanced by grand services or great deeds,—­if their sons and daughters have shed lustre on the land which gave them birth.  But no lustre survives egotism or vice; it only lasts when it gilds a noble life.  There is no glory in the name of Jezebel, or Cleopatra, or Catherine de’ Medici, brilliant and fascinating as were those queens; but there is glory in the memory of Heloise.  There is no woman in French history of whom the nation is prouder; revered, in spite of early follies, by the most austere and venerated saints of her beclouded age, and hallowed by the tributes of succeeding centuries for those sentiments which the fires of passion were scarcely able to tarnish, for an exalted soul which eclipsed the brightness of uncommon intellectual faculties, for a depth of sympathy and affection which have become embalmed in the heart of the world, and for a living piety which blazes all the more conspicuously from the sins which she expiated by such bitter combats.  She was human in her impulses, but divine in her graces; one of those characters for whom we cannot help feeling the deepest sympathy and the profoundest admiration,—­a character that has its contradictions, like that warrior-bard who was after God’s own heart, in spite of his crimes, because his soul thirsted for the beatitudes of heaven, and was bound in loving loyalty to his Maker, against whom he occasionally sinned by force of mortal passions, but whom he never ignored or forgot, and against whom he never persistently rebelled.