ss true; and their experience is
accurately depicted, and offers an invaluable lesson for those who
can read it. "I had, from a child," Woldemar writes, "a sweet
lovingness for every thing which came in beauty towards my senses or
my soul. I was full of pleasure, courage, and sadness. I bore
something in my heart which divided me from all things; yea, from
myself, I strove so earnestly to embrace and unite myself with all.
But what made my heart so loving, so foolish, so warm and good, that
I never found in any one. Before the rising and before the setting
sun, under the moon and the stars, full of love and full of despair,
I have wept as Pygmalion before the image of his goddess." After
many vain trials to win a sufficing friendship, after long
observation of others and study of himself, Woldemar concluded it
unattainable, and laid the hope aside. "I found," he says, "that,
collectively and singly, we nourish too many and too eager desires,
are too deeply harassed by the pursuits, cares, joys, and pains of
life, are too much tortured, excited, distracted, for two men
anywhere, in these times, to become and remain so completely one as
my loving enthusiasm had made me dream." But Henriette revived this
long-forgotten dream in Woldemar, and made it real; and in his
friendship we see carried out the idea of a man in whom a foreign
personality has so overlaid and taken up his own, absorbing his will
and determining his re-actions, that, in his relation to her, the
element of sex is excluded, as it is in his relation to himself; and
marriage with her would seem to him worse than incest.

The Duchess de Duras, in a letter to Madame Swetchine, expresses
herself as being "indignant with the refinements of Woldemar,"

"The mixture of true and false, the combination of just reasoning
with perverted sentiment. This love which is not friendship! and this
friendship which is not love! Well, in the name of God, to love, is
it not to love? Ah, Madame la Duchesse! do you think, then, that all
the infinitely complicated minglings and windings of human feeling
are so lucid and simple? Is Jacobi, the German Plato, so stupid a
metaphysician and so low a moralist that you can so easily teach him
acumen and ethics? Scorn or mirth is misdirected against him." Had
Madame Swetchine read "Woldemar," we may be sure her verdict would
have been different.

France has stood for a long time in advance of every other nation, in
regard to the frien