of her powerful fancy have been taken for images of herself, and the popular mind, delighting to elevate all things beyond the bounds of Nature, has made her a monster.  It is clear, we think, that those who have represented her as plunged headlong in a career of vice and dissipation, the companion of all that is low and trivial, have slandered alike her acts and her intentions.  Like the rest of us, she is the child of her antecedents and surroundings.  Her education was as exceptional as her character.  Her marriage brought no moral influence to bear upon her.  Her separation opened before her a new and strange way, never to be trodden by any with impunity.  Yet we do not believe, that, in the most undesirable circumstances of her life, she ever long lost sight of its ideal object.  We do not doubt that her zeal for human progress, her sympathy for the wrongs of the race, and her distrust of existing institutions were deep and sincere.  We do not doubt that she was devoted in friendship, disinterested in love, ardent in philanthropy.  She has seen the poverty and insincerity of society; she has quarrelled with what she calls the shams of sacred things, the merely conventional marriage, the God of bigotry and hypocrisy, the government of oppression and fraud; but she ends by recognizing and demanding the marriage of heart, the God of enlightened faith, the government of order and progress.  Responding to the dominant chord of the nineteenth century, she strove to exalt individuality above sociality, and passion above decorum and usage.  Nor would she allow any World’s Congress of morals to settle the delicate limits between these opposing vital forces, between what we owe to ourselves and what we owe to others.  If there be a divine of passion for which it is noble to suffer and sacrifice, there is also a deeper divine of duty, far transcending the other both in sacrifice and in reward.  To this divine, too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders homage; and to its gentle redemption, our loving, pitying hearts—­the more loving, the more pitying for her story—­are glad to leave her.

Ave, thou long laborious!  Ave, thou worker of wonders, thou embalmer of things most fleeting, most precious, so sealed in thy amber,

  “That Nature yet remembers
  What was so fugitive!”

Thou hast wrought many a picture of wild and guilty passion,—­yet methinks thou didst always paint the mean as mean, the generous as generous.  Nobler stories, too, thou hast told, and thy Consuelo is as pure as holy charity and lofty art could make her.  They complain, that, in the world of thy creations, women are sublime and men weak; may not these things, then, be seen and judged for once through woman’s eyes?  Much harm hast thou done?  Nay, that can only God know.  They misquote thee, who veil a life of low intrigue with high-flown dicta borrowed from thy works.  Thou art not of their sort,—­or, if it be indeed thee they seek to imitate,