it more. It ingulfs and
absorbs all emotions, being no more agitated by them than the sleeping
waters of some tranquil lake, reflecting the moving images thronging
its banks from its polished surface, are by the varied motions and eager
life of the many objects mirrored upon its glassy bosom. The drowsy
waters cannot thus be wakened from their icy lethargy. This melancholy
saddens even the highest joy. "Through the exhaustion always
accompanying such tension, when the soul is strained above the region
which it naturally inhabits... the insufficiency of speech is felt for
the first time by those who have studied it so much, and used it so
well--we are borne from all active, from all militant instincts--to
travel through boundless space--to be lost in the immensity of
adventurous courses far, far above the clouds... where we no longer
see that the earth is beautiful, because our gaze is riveted upon the
skies... where reality is no longer poetically draped, as has been so
skilfully done by the author of Waverley, but where, in idealizing
poetry itself, the infinite is peopled with the spirits belonging only
to its mystic realm, as has been done by Byron in his Manfred."

Could Madame Sand have divined the incurable melancholy, the will which
cannot blend with that of others, the imperious exclusiveness, which
invariably seize upon imaginations delighting in the pursuit of dreams
whose realities are nowhere to be found, or at least never in the
matter-of-fact world in which the dreamers are constrained to dwell?
Had she foreseen the form which devoted attachment assumes for such
dreamers; had she measured the entire and absolute absorption which they
will alone accept as the synonyme of tenderness? It is necessary to be
in some degree shy, shrinking, and secretive as they themselves are, to
be able to understand the hidden depths of characters so concentrated.
Like those susceptible flowers which close their sensitive petals before
the first breath of the North wind, they too veil their exacting souls
in the shrouds of self concentration, unfolding themselves only under
the warming rays of a propitious sun. Such natures have been called
"rich by exclusiveness;" in opposition to those which are "rich by
expansiveness." "If these differing temperaments should meet and
approach each other, they can never mingle or melt the one into the
other," (says the writer whom we have so often quoted) "but the one must
consume the other