re resemblance than between the
string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes. Indeed, writing
was not her virtual expression: this may be learned even in her peculiar
way of loving Nature, for it was not so much Nature itself as Nature's
effects that she prized; and between the work now performed and that
awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists
between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and
covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble.
She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no
student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her
sentences were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go
back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him;
there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so
bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of
initiation,--but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It
was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no
reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the
real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the
author's nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman "thus
intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the
world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the
most rare," she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception.
But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as
hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused
effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched
and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention
Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite
pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let
us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris,
having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her
head,--or Clotilda at her books, "looking very much like an old picture
of a young person sitting there,"--or the charming one of Laura's _pas_,
which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, "She quite swam,
and turned her eyes upward,"--or, better, yet, that portrait of a
Romagnese woman: "of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still
remembered, with hair to her knees, wrap