so well—­we are borne from all active, from all militant instincts—­to travel through boundless space—­to be lost in the immensity of adventurous courses far, far above the clouds...where we no longer see that the earth is beautiful, because our gaze is riveted upon the skies...where reality is no longer poetically draped, as has been so skilfully done by the author of Waverley, but where, in idealizing poetry itself, the infinite is peopled with the spirits belonging only to its mystic realm, as has been done by Byron in his Manfred.”

Could Madame Sand have divined the incurable melancholy, the will which cannot blend with that of others, the imperious exclusiveness, which invariably seize upon imaginations delighting in the pursuit of dreams whose realities are nowhere to be found, or at least never in the matter-of-fact world in which the dreamers are constrained to dwell?  Had she foreseen the form which devoted attachment assumes for such dreamers; had she measured the entire and absolute absorption which they will alone accept as the synonyme of tenderness?  It is necessary to be in some degree shy, shrinking, and secretive as they themselves are, to be able to understand the hidden depths of characters so concentrated.  Like those susceptible flowers which close their sensitive petals before the first breath of the North wind, they too veil their exacting souls in the shrouds of self concentration, unfolding themselves only under the warming rays of a propitious sun.  Such natures have been called “rich by exclusiveness;” in opposition to those which are “rich by expansiveness.”  “If these differing temperaments should meet and approach each other, they can never mingle or melt the one into the other,” (says the writer whom we have so often quoted) “but the one must consume the other, leaving nothing but ashes behind.”  Alas! it is the natures like that of the fragile musician whose days we commemorate, which, consuming themselves, perish; not wishing, not indeed being able, to live any life but one in conformity with their own exclusive Ideal.

Chopin seemed to dread Madame Sand more than any other woman, the modern Sibyl, who, like the Pythoness of old, had said so many things that others of her sex neither knew nor dared to say.  He avoided and put off all introduction to her.  Madame Sand was ignorant of this.  In consequence of that captivating simplicity, which is one of her noblest charms, she did not divine his fear of the Delphic priestess.  At last she was presented to him, and an acquaintance with her soon dissipated the prejudices which he had obstinately nourished against female authors.