y,
broadened and brightened into a friendship emphatically worthy of the
name. The sight of a mother and a daughter thus happily paired is
beautiful and holy. And there are far more examples of it than the
world knows.

Probably, the best representation of this union is the one afforded
by Madame de Sevigne and Madame de Grignan. These celebrated ladies,
among the most brilliant of the long roll of distinguished French
women, were possessed of every charm of person and spirit,
fascinating grace, dignity, intelligence, accomplishments, purity,
and generosity. In their early years, they were inseparable. They
hung on each other's looks and motions. The wish of the mother was
the instinctive law of the child. The beautiful image of the
daughter, loved to the verge of distraction, seemed gradually to
occupy the whole being of the mother. For, as Madame de Sevigne
successively lost her idolized husband and her most endeared friend,
the unhappy Fouquet, the maternal instinct seemed to take up into
itself all the baffled or bereaved passions, and, magnified and
vivified by the appropriation, to transform itself into a friendship
which almost annihilated her individuality, beneath the ideal stamp
and transfused impression of that of her daughter. The pain of
parting from her was like the anguish of tearing the soul out of the
body. During the period of their separation, memory took the place of
sight; ideas, of actions; correspondence, of conversation. She
constantly writes to the absent one, and seems to live only for this.
Every observation, reflection, emotion, finds a place in the tender
and immortal record. She spares no pains to make her letters
interesting to the receiver. She writes, "I shall live for the
purpose of loving you. I abandon my life to that occupation." It is
affecting to note the agitation of the mother at every ruffle on the
life of the daughter. In tracing the thoughts, feelings, events, that
vibrated across the relation between them, one can hardly escape the
conviction, that the soul of the younger friend was ideally
superimposed on the self-abnegating soul of the elder friend, and
governed it, as the mental processes of a magnetized person are said
to be superseded by the personality and states of consciousness of
the magnetizer. A single passion has seldom so consistently ruled a
being as the affection of Madame de Sevigne for her daughter; and it
was returned by the latter with all the fervor of w