were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him; there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty:  her thoughts were so bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of initiation,—­but having mastered the style, one knew the writer.  It was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the author’s nature:  and although she somewhere said that a woman “thus intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the most rare,” she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception.  But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose.  Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,—­or Clotilda at her books, “looking very much like an old picture of a young person sitting there,”—­or the charming one of Laura’s pas, which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, “She quite swam, and turned her eyes upward,”—­or, better, yet, that portrait of a Romagnese woman:  “of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still remembered, with hair to her knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante’s Beatrice, a skin of yellow whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness quenches majesty,—­the mould of the mystical Lucretia.”  There are sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter’s brush will ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness beneath her touch.

But, after all, this was not her style’s chief excellence; she cared little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel rather than to see her meaning.  What distinguished her yet more was the ability by means of this style to interpret music into words.  Although this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who did not now and then attempt it:  musicians themselves never do, because music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they breathe, and in fact a state of being.  Do you remember that tone-wreath of heather and honeysuckle?  “It was a movement of such intense meaning that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as the fragrance of a single flower, and only the