dame de Krudener writes to her, "I shall have the happiness, I
hope, dear angel, of embracing you to-morrow, and talking with you."
All seemed instantly to recognize something angelic in her
expression. It was in her disposition as much as in her appearance,
apparently in the latter because in the former, as Ballanche said to
her, "In your thought, taste, and grace will ever be united in one
harmonious whole. I am fascinated at the idea of so perfect a
harmony, and want the whole world to know what I so easily divine. It
will be your mission to make the intrinsic character of beauty fully
understood; to show that it is an entirely moral thing. Had Plato
known you, he need not have resorted to so subtile an argument. You
would have made him alive to a truth that was always a mystery to
him; and that rare genius would thus have had one more title to the
admiration of the world."

There was something celestial in her motions, that suggested the
undulations of a spirit rather than joints and muscles, and made her
soul and flesh one melody. As to her heavenly temper of goodness,
there is but one voice from all who knew her. She accorded to the
sufferings of self-love a pity and kindness seldom shown to them. She
had the sweetest faculty for dressing the wounds of envy and
jealousy, soothing the lacerations of rivalry and hate, assuaging the
bitterness of neglected and revengeful souls. For all those moral
pains, or griefs of imagination, which burn in some natures with a
cruel intensity, she was a true sister of charity. To the rest of her
winsome gifts she added according to the unanimous testimony of the
witnesses this rare and resistless quality, the power of listening
to, and occupying herself with, others, the secret both of social
success, and of happiness without that success. "She said little," De
Tocqueville avers, "but knew what each man's forte was, and led him
to it. If any thing was said particularly well, her face brightened.
You saw that her attention was always active, always intelligent."
Lamartine said, "As radiant as Aspasia, but a pure and Christian
Aspasia, it was not her features only that were beautiful: she was
beautiful herself." Sarah Austin affirmed, "It was the atmosphere of
benignity which seemed to exhale like a delicate perfume from her
whole person, that prolonged the fascination of her beauty." And
Lemoine declared, in his eloquent obituary notice, "In the hearts of
those who had the honor a