this earth. Help me to fulfil my mission. I regard it as a blessing
that you will be loved and appreciated when you are no more. It would
be a real misfortune if so excellent a being should pass merely as a
charming shadow. Of what use is memory, if it does not perpetuate the
beautiful and good?"

This league of lofty friendship, of endearing intercourse and
service, held good while a whole generation of mortals came upon the
stage and disappeared; and it throve with growing validity in the
latest old age of the fortunate parties. Ballanche believed, after
the death of his mother, that he saw her, several successive
mornings, enter his room, and ask him how he had passed the night.
This ocular illusion affords us an affecting glimpse of his heart. He
wrote to his friend, "Antiquity confides its weariness and grief to
us, without doubt, to beguile us from our own." "Had Orpheus never
met Eurydice, his existence would have remained incomplete; and, in
place of the cruel grief of her loss, he would have known another
grief not less intense, solitude of soul." "I am alone, and the
solitude weighs heavily upon me. Permit me to solace myself by
talking a moment with you." "I protest to you in all sincerity, that
my one absorbing thought is my warm feeling of friendship for you. I
have need to be assured by you, and that as often as possible, that
this sentiment shall not end in unhappiness for me. The thought of
that is an agony which terrifies me. You are so kind, you have so
much sympathy for all unhappy persons, that I fear it is through pity
and condescension that you show kindness to me." This expression was
in the year 1816; but all such uneasiness soon vanished, and he
learned to rely on her sincere cordiality with a serene assurance,
which was the richest luxury of his life.

In 1830, Ballanche, publishing his chief work, the "Palingenesie
Sociale," dedicated it to Madame Recamier, in a form whose delicacy
and fervor made it one of the most exquisite pieces of praise ever
paid in letters. Alluding to Canova's portrait of Madame Recamier, in
the character of the celestial guide of Dante, he says, "An artist
enveloped in a grand renown, a sculptor who has just shed so much
glory on the illustrious land of Dante, and whose graceful
imagination the masterpieces of antiquity have so often exalted, one
day, for the first time, saw a woman who seemed to him a living
apparition of Beatrice. Full of that religious emotion w