She knew these unknown friends so well that after having again seen them, “she could not dream of them without palpitations of the heart during the whole day.”  She was initiated into the Hoffmannic world—­“she who had surprised such ineffable smiles upon the portraits of the dead;” [Footnote:  SPIRIDSON] who had seen the rays of the sun falling through the stained glass of a Gothic window form a halo round loved heads, like the arm of God, luminous and impalpable, surrounded by a vortex of atoms;—­she who had known such glorious apparitions, clothed with the purple and golden glories of the setting sun.  The realm of fantasy had no myth with whose secret she was not familiar!

Thus she was naturally anxious to become acquainted with one who had with rapid wing flown “to those scenes which it is impossible to describe, but which must exist somewhere, either upon the earth, or in some of the planets, whose light we love to gaze upon in the forests when the moon has set.” [Footnote:  LETTRES D’UN voyageur] Such scenes she had prayed never to be forced to desert—­never desiring to bring her heart and imagination back to this dreary world, too like the gloomy coasts of Finland, where the slime and miry slough can only be escaped by scaling the naked granite of the solitary rocks.  Fatigued with the massive statue she had sculptured, the Amazonian Lelia; wearied with the grandeur of an Ideal which it is impossible to mould from the gross materials of this earth; she was desirous to form an acquaintance with the artist “the lover of an impossible so shadowy”—­so near the starry regions.  Alas! if these regions are exempt from the poisonous miasmas of our atmosphere, they are not free from its desolating melancholy!  Perhaps those who are transported there may adore the shining of new suns—­but there are others not less dear whose light they must see extinguished!  Will not the most glorious among the beloved constellation of the Pleiades there disappear?  Like drops of luminous dew the stars fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss, whose bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul, contemplating these fields of ether, this blue Sahara with its wandering and perishing oases,—­is stricken by a grief so hopeless, so profound, that neither enthusiasm nor love can ever soothe it more.  It ingulfs and absorbs all emotions, being no more agitated by them than the sleeping waters of some tranquil lake, reflecting the moving images thronging its banks from its polished surface, are by the varied motions and eager life of the many objects mirrored upon its glassy bosom.  The drowsy waters cannot thus be wakened from their icy lethargy.  This melancholy saddens even the highest joy.  “Through the exhaustion always accompanying such tension, when the soul is strained above the region which it naturally inhabits...the insufficiency of speech is felt for the first time by those who have studied it so much, and used it