And if through awful gloom I see

The lightnings of his great will thrusting,
Shall I not, dying at his hand,

Die trusting?

"WHEN FIRST YOU WENT »

From Titian's Garden and Other Poems. Copyright 1897, by Copeland

W"

& Day

HEN first you went, oh, desert was the day,

The lonely day, and desert was the night;

And alien was the power that robbed from me

The white and starlike beauty of your face,
The white and starlike splendor of your soul!
Since you were all of life, I too had died,—
Died, not as you into the larger life,
But into nothingness,— had not the thought
Of your bright being led outward, as a beam
Piercing the labyrinthine gloom shows light
Somewhere existing.

Like a golden lure

Bringing me to the open was the thought,—
For since I loved you still, you still must be,
And where you were, there I must follow you.
And follow, follow, follow, cried the winds,
And follow, follow, murmured all the tides,
And follow, sang the stars that wove the web
Of their white orbits far in shining space,
Where Sirius with his dark companion went.
Bound in the bands of Law they ranged the deep;
And Law, I said, means Will to utter Law;
And Will means One, indeed, to have the Will.

And having found that One, shall it not be
The One Supreme of all, whose power I prove,
Whose inconceivable intelligence

Faintly divine, and who perforce must dwell
Compact of love, that most supreme of all?
Had I found God, and should I not find you?

That love supreme will never mock my search.
That thought accordant in the infinite
The great flame of your spirit will not quench.
That power embattled through the universe

Needs in all firmaments your panoply
Of stainless purity, of crystal truth;
Your sympathy that melts into the pang,
Your blazing wrath with wrong, your tenderness
To every small or suffering thing, as sweet
As purple twilight touching throbbing eyes;
Your answer to great music when it breathes
Silver and secret speech from sphere to sphere;
Your thrill before the beauty of the earth;
Your passion for the sorrow of the race!
You who in the gray waste of night awoke
When clashing mill-bells frolicking in air
Called up the day, and sounded in your ear
Clank of enormous fetters that have bound
Labor in all lands; you whose pity went
Out on the long swell where the fisherman
Slides with his shining boat-load in the dark;
You whom the versed in statecraft paused to hear,
The sullen prisoner blest, the old man loved,
The little children ran along beside;

You who to women were the Knight of God.
Therefore as God lives, so I know do you.

And with that knowledge comes a keener joy
Than blushing, beating, folds young love about.
Again the sky burns azure, and the stars
Lean from their depths to tell me of your state.
Again the sea-line meets the line divine,
And the surge shatters in wide melody;
The unguessed hues that the soul swells to note
Haunting the rainbow's edges lead me on;
And all the dropping dews of summer nights
Keep measure with the music in my heart.
And still I climb where you have passed before,
Unchallenged spirit who inclosed my days
As in a jewel, walled about with light!
And far, far off, I seem to see you go
Familiar of unknown immensity,
And move, enlarged to all the rosy vast,
And boon companion of the dawn beyond.

MADAME DE STAËL

(1766-1817)

N THE very interesting and admirable notice of Madame de Staël by her cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, it is said: "The works of Madame de Staël seem to belong to the future. They indicate, as they also tend to produce, a new epoch in society and in letters; an age of strong, generous, living thought,-of emotions springing from the heart:" and there follows a description of the sort of literature to which Madame de Staël's writings belong, - a literature "more spoken than written," a literature of spontaneous, informal expression, which appeals to us more intimately and more powerfully than any elaborate and studied composition. This appeal is especially intimate and powerful in Madame de Staël's pages, because she may be called, perhaps, the first "modern woman." She had in many respects a tone of mind resembling our more than

MADAME DE STAËL

it resembled that of the greater number of even the noteworthy men and women of her own day. There is a much greater moral distance between her and her immediate predecessors in society and in literature, than between her and her immediate successors-whether in France or elsewhere. This kinship with the last half of the nineteenth century, and with other modes of thought than those of her own country, is partly due to her Protestant form of faith. She cared little for dogmas, but the fibre of her being had been fed by liberal Protestant thought. From this cause chiefly, though there were others also, arose a striking contrast between the tone of her mind and that of her great contemporary Châteaubriand. Their opinions on all subjects were affected and colored by their religious opinions. He is now remote from us, he is read as "a classic": she comes close to us, and inspires us with friendly emotions.

To be in advance of one's age, if one is a genius, is to tread a sure path to immortality; but if, like Madame de Staël, one is only the possessor of intellectual ability, it is the straight road to forgetfulness. Those who come after us take little interest in hearing

their own ideas expressed less effectively than they themselves are expressing them; and so it happens that the world of letters now takes too little account of Madame de Staël, while her own times were incompetent to judge her. We do not value her enough: they did not value her rightly. The false and brilliant light thrown upon her by the enmity of Napoleon, obscured rather than revealed what was really interesting and noble in her; while the assumption that because there was a masculine scope and strength in her intelli gence she had a masculine nature, has completely confused her image She was not precisely feminine, but she was essentially a woman; and her most admirable powers, her highest successes, her real importance to the world, lie in the fact that her thoughts passed from her brain through a woman's heart. It must be confessed it did not always make them wiser thoughts; but it invested them with a sincerity and an ardor that give the force of fine passion to studies in politics and in literature. For these studies in politics and in literature are at bottom studies in sociology,- that science whose name was unknown, while its foundations were being laid by the promoters, the victims, the critics of the French Revolution; the science whose students are lovers of humanity.

This noble title is one to which Madame de Staël has full right. She is a leader in the great army of those who love, who honor, and who desire to serve their kind: one of those leaders who disseminate their principles and communicate their emotions, but who give no positive counsels; who show their quality chiefly by their love of liberty and their love of light. Wherever she saw the traces of liberty or the track of light, she followed fearlessly. And therefore it is, that as one of the last and one of the ablest of her critics— M. Albert Sorel- has remarked (in the excellent study of her published in the series of 'Les Grands Écrivains Français), few writers have exercised in so many different directions, so prolonged an influence. She had during her life, and she continues to have after her death, an immense power of inspiring other souls with lofty aspirations and high thoughts.

It is chiefly the qualities of her character that make her writings now worth reading. Her character illuminates the whole mass. Many of her pages would be dull and empty to the reader of to-day, if it were not that every sentence-involuntarily but unrestrainedly — reveals the writer. She recognized this herself, and said: "When one writes for the satisfaction of the inward inspiration that takes possession of the soul, the writings make known, even without intending it, the writer's mental conditions, of every kind and degree." Between the lines of her own writings her whole life may be read; not her life of thought only, but her life of action.

This life of action, of incessant humane action on others, and with and for others, was of too complicated a character, and involved too many relations, to be narrated here save in the most general terms. The supreme affections of her life were, from birth to death, for her father, and during twenty years for her lover, Benjamin Constant. These two passions colored her whole existence: her ardent love and admiration for her father supplied unfailing nutriment to her heart, and her enthusiasm for Benjamin Constant (of which he was little worthy) stimulated her intellect to its most brilliant achievements. Too much stress can hardly be laid on the ennobling effects on her character of her father's influence. He can scarcely be called a great man; but she fervently adored him with the deepest gratitude all his life, and after his death, in a singularly delightful intimacy of relation.

As her father's daughter, and from her own noble powers, she became one of the most conspicuous figures in the party of the constitutional reformers, and was more or less drawn into political affairs. But she never threw herself into the current; she never left her salon, whatever was going on outside; and when the earthquake of the Revolution came and her four walls fell, she could find no refuge in any party lines. She was from first to last a witness of political events rather than an actor in them; a witness of most exceptional quality, who could distinguish in the confused and troubled present the old instincts of the past and the new beliefs of the future, and could indicate in lasting lines the meaning of the passing day.

This is the more remarkable because, woman-like, she was always more interested in persons than in purposes, - in the actors than in the actions: and while her sympathies were strong for "the people," she hardly took count of "the State" in the abstract; the word rarely occurs in her writings. The establishment of guarantees of political liberty was what her political friends strove for; and as M. Sorel points out, this enlightened demand was not quite the same as the blind demand for civil liberty and its concomitants, which inspired the passions of the great majority of Frenchmen. It was the latter cause and not the former that was gained by the Revolution; and consequently the political interests of Madame de Staël were only a source of disappointment and suffering to her, complicated as they were with the political disgrace of her father, his unpopularity, and the oblivion into which he fell.

After the Revolution broke out, she lived for the most part at Coppet, her father's Swiss home. An object of bitter enmity first to the Directory, later to the First Consul, and afterward to Napoleon when Emperor, she was exiled from Paris from 1792 to 1814. During these years she visited England, Germany, and Italy, studying XXIII-865