devotion which would so link two friends, two fellow soldiers, that
either would feel dishonored if he forgot them, and they may consider
themselves free of all obligations by attributing the services to
love--as if this additional gift of love detracted from the value of the
rest!

One cannot help noticing how lacking in neatness of expression is this
woman who wrote so much. It is because she wrote so much that she wrote
in such a muffled manner. It is because she thought so much that her
reflections were either not her own, or were never clear. It is because
she loved so much, and had so many lovers--Benjamin Constant; Vincenzo
Monti, the Italian poet; M. de Narbonne, and others, as well as young
Rocca--that she found both love and lovers tedious.

She talked so much that her conversation was almost always mere personal
opinion. Thus she told Goethe that he never was really brilliant until
after he had got through a bottle of champagne. Schiller said that to
talk with her was to have a "rough time," and that after she left him,
he always felt like a man who was just getting over a serious illness.
She never had time to do anything very well.

There is an interesting glimpse of her in the recollections of Dr.
Bollmann, at the period when Mme. de Stael was in her prime. The worthy
doctor set her down as a genius--an extraordinary, eccentric woman in
all that she did. She slept but a few hours out of the twenty-four, and
was uninterruptedly and fearfully busy all the rest of the time. While
her hair was being dressed, and even while she breakfasted, she used to
keep on writing, nor did she ever rest sufficiently to examine what she
had written.

Such then was Mme. de Stael, a type of the time in which she lived, so
far as concerns her worship of sensibility--of sensibility, and not
of love; for love is too great to be so scattered and made a thing to
prattle of, to cheapen, and thus destroy. So we find at the last that
Germaine de Stael, though she was much read and much feted and much
followed, came finally to that last halting-place where confessedly
she was merely an old woman, eccentric, and unattractive. She sued her
former lovers for the money she had lent them, she scolded and found
fault--as perhaps befits her age.

But such is the natural end of sensibility, and of the woman who
typifies it for succeeding generations.

THE STORY OF KARL MARX

Some time ago I entered a fairly large library--on