having caused Don Juan to be cursed, and a divine hymn to be chanted to Desire by Lelia, who, as well as Don Juan, had repulsed the only delight which crowns desire, the luxury of self-abnegation,—­after having fully revenged Elvira by the creation of Stenio,—­after having scorned man more than Don Juan had degraded woman,—­Madame Sand, in her LETTRES D’UN voyageur, depicts the shivering palsy, the painful lethargy which seizes the artist, when, having incorporated the emotion which inspired him in his work, his imagination still remains under the domination of the insatiate idea without being able to find another form in which to incarnate it.  Such poetic sufferings were well understood by Byron, when he makes Tasso shed his most bitter tears, not for his chains, not for his physical sufferings, not for the ignominy heaped upon him, but for his finished Epic, for the ideal world created by his thought and now about to close its doors upon him, and by thus expelling him from its enchanted realm, rendering him at last sensible of the gloomy realities around him:—­

     “But this is o’er—­my pleasant task is done:—­
     My long-sustaining friend of many years: 
     If I do blot thy final page with tears,
     Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none. 
     But thou, my young creation! my soul’s child! 
     Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
     And woo’d me from myself with thy sweet sight,
     Thou too art gone—­and so is my delight.”

Lamentof Tasso.—­Byron.

At this epoch, Madame Sand often heard a musician, one of the friends who had greeted Chopin with the most enthusiastic joy upon his arrival at Paris, speak of him.  She heard him praise his poetic genius even more than his artistic talent.  She was acquainted with his compositions, and admired their graceful tenderness.  She was struck by the amount of emotion displayed in his poems, with the effusions of a heart so noble and dignified.  Some of the countrymen of Chopin spoke to her of the women of their country, with the enthusiasm natural to them upon that subject, an enthusiasm then very much increased by a remembrance of the sublime sacrifices made by them during the last war.  Through their recitals and the poetic inspiration of the Polish artist, she perceived an ideal of love which took the form of worship for woman.  She thought that guaranteed from dependence, preserved from inferiority, her role might be like the fairy power of the Peri, that ethereal intelligence and friend of man.  Perhaps she did not fully understand what innumerable links of suffering, of silence, of patience, of gentleness, of indulgence, of courageous perseverance, had been necessary for the formation of the worship for this imperious but resigned ideal, beautiful indeed, but sad to behold, like those plants with the rose-colored corollas, whose stems, intertwining and interlacing in a network of long and numerous branches, give life to ruins; destined ever to embellish decay, growing upon old walls and hiding only tottering stones!  Beautiful veils woven by beneficent Nature, in her ingenious and inexhaustible richness, to cover the constant decay of human things!