’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, a la mode du genre femenin.  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.’

ALFRED DE VIGNY.

    ’Sept., 1839.

      ’"La harpe tremble encore, et la flute 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 child of the generous, but extravagant youth of Germany.  I thought she had been left at the foundling hospital, as not worth a parent’s care, and that now, grown up, she was trying to prove at once her parentage and her charms by certificates which might be headed, Innocent Adultery, Celestial Crime, &c.

’The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not dispel these impressions.  And I thought Chateaubriand (far too French for my taste also,) belonged to l’ancien regime, and that Beranger and Courier stood apart.  Nodier, Paul de Kock, Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as little.

’But I have now got a peep at this galaxy.  I begin to divine the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres.  I perceive that la jeune France is the legitimate, though far younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her, but of a common mother.  I see, at least begin to see, what she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too light.

’Blessed be the early days when