ning its special characteristics, should be in
fruitful communication with its fellows.

In 1811 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the wife of Albert
de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more than twenty years her junior.
Their courage was rewarded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland,
Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall of Napoleon Madame
de Stael was once more in Paris, and there in 1817 she died. The _Dix
Annees d'Exil_, posthumously published, records a portion of her
agitated life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial
persecutor. The unfinished _Considerations sur la Revolution
Francaise_, designed originally as an apology for Necker, defends
the Revolution while admitting its crimes and errors; its true object,
as the writer conceived--political liberty--had been in the end
attained; her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a
revolutionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with a
system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country in which
she saw her political aspirations most nearly realised.

III

FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND was born in 1768, at St.-Malo, of an
ancient Breton family. Except for the companionship of an elder sister,
of fragile health and romantic temper, his childhood was solitary.
The presence of the old count his father inspired terror. The boy's
society was with the waves and winds, or at the old chateau of Combourg,
with lonely woods and wilds. Horace, Tibullus, _Telemaque_, the
sermons of Massillon, nourished his imagination or stimulated his
religious sentiment; but solitude and nature were his chief
inspirers.

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfied
dreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the army
was procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something
of literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted
France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Passage,
set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery,
Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The news
of the execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton and
a royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. To
gratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing the
frontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrow
caused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion
of h