more subtle
power; a power which Madame Sand possesses by a double right, by the
intuitions of her heart, and the vigor of her genius. After having named
Madame Sand, whose energetic personality and electric genius inspired
the frail and delicate organization of Chopin with an intensity of
admiration which consumed him, as a wine too spirituous shatters the
fragile vase; we cannot now call up other names from the dim limbus of
the past, in which so many indistinct images, such doubtful sympathies,
such indefinite projects and uncertain beliefs, are forever surging and
hurtling. Perhaps there is no one among us, who, in looking through the
long vista, would not meet the ghost of some feeling whose shadowy
form he would find impossible to pass! Among the varied interests, the
burning desires, the restless tendencies surging through the epoch in
which so many high hearts and brilliant intellects were fortuitously
thrown together, how few of them, alas! possessed sufficient vitality to
enable them to resist the numberless causes of death, surrounding every
idea, every feeling, as well as every individual life, from the cradle
to the grave! Even during the moments of the troubled existence of the
emotions now past, how many of them escaped that saddest of all human
judgments: "Happy, oh, happy were it dead! Far happier had it never
been born!" Among the varied feelings with which so many noble hearts
throbbed high, were there indeed many which never incurred this fearful
malediction? Like the suicide lover in Mickiewicz's poem, who returns to
life in the land of the Dead only to renew the dreadful suffering of his
earth life, perhaps among all the emotions then so vividly felt there is
not a single one which, could it again live, would reappear without the
disfigurements, the brandings, the bruises, the mutilations, which
were inflicted on its early beauty, which so deeply sullied its primal
innocence! And if we should persist in recalling these melancholy ghosts
of dead thoughts and buried feelings from the heavy folds of the shroud,
would they not actually appal us, because so few of them possessed
sufficient purity and celestial radiance to redeem them from the shame
of being utterly disowned, entirely repudiated, by those whose bliss or
torment they formed during the passionate hours of their absolute rule?
In very pity ask us not to call from the Dead, ghosts whose resurrection
would be so painful! Who could bear the sep