icious must seek its
gratification at other hands than ours: we will not be its ministers.
With all this, we are not obliged to shut our eyes to the true
significance of what she tells us, or to assume that in the account
she gives us of herself there is necessarily less self-deception than
self-judgment generally exhibits. If she mistakes the selfish for the
heroic, exalts a gratification into a duty, and preaches to her sex as
from the standpoint of a morality superior to theirs, we shall set it
down as it seems to us. But, for the sake of manhood as well as of
womanhood, we would not that any mean or malignant hand should endeavor
to show where she failed, and how.

Was she not to all of us, in our early years, a name of doubt, dread,
and enchantment? Did not all of us feel, in our young admiration for
her, something of the world's great struggle between conservative
discipline and revolutionary inspiration? We knew our parents would not
have us read her, _if they knew_. We knew they were right. Yet we read
her at stolen hours, with waning and still entreated light; and as we
read, in a dreary wintry room, with the flickering candle warning us
of late hours and confiding expectations, the atmosphere grew warm and
glorious about us,--a true human company, a living sympathy crept near
us,--the very world seemed not the same world after as before. She had
given us a real gift; no criticism could take it away. The hands might
be sinful, but the box they broke contained an exceeding precious
ointment.

At a later day we saw these things rather differently. The electric
intoxication over, which book or being gives but once to the same
person, its elements were viewed with some distrust. Passing from ideal
to real life, as all pass, who live on, we shook our heads over the
books, sighed, ceased to read them. Grown mothers ourselves, we quietly
removed them as far as possible from the young hands about us, and would
rather have deprived them of the noble French language altogether than
have allowed it to bring them such lessons as Jacques and Valentine.
Yet we retain the old love for her; the world of literature still seems
brighter for her footsteps; and should we live to learn her death, tears
must follow it, and the sense of void left by the loss of a true friend,
noble and loyal-hearted, if mistaken. With this confession of sympathy
with the woman, we begin the critical consideration of the memoirs of
herself she has g