er,
whether through long and bitter exercise, or, whether spontaneously
collecting its forgotten strength, it concentrates its force in some new
and decisive moment of destiny: as when the rays of the sun are able to
kindle a flame of celestial origin when concentrated in the focus of the
burning glass, brittle and fragile though the medium be.

All the long scattered rays of happiness were collected within this
epoch of the life of Chopin; is it then surprising that they should have
rekindled the flame of life, and that it should have burned at this time
with the most vivid lustre? The solitude surrounded by the blue waves of
the Mediterranean and shaded by groves of orange, seemed fitted in
its exceeding loveliness for the ardent vows of youthful lovers, still
believing in their naive and sweet illusions, sighing for happiness
in "some desert isle." He breathed there that air for which natures
unsuited for the world, and never feeling themselves happy in it,
long with such a painful home-sickness; that air which may be found
everywhere if we can find the sympathetic souls to breathe it with us,
and which is to be met nowhere without them; that air of the land of
our dreams; and which in spite of all obstacles, of the bitter real, is
easily discovered when sought by two! It is the air of the country of
the ideal to which we gladly entice the being we cherish, repeating with
poor Mignon: DAHIN! DAHIN!... LASST UNS ZIEHN!

As long as his sickness lasted, Madame Sand never left the pillow of him
who loved her even to death, with an attachment which in losing all its
joys, did not lose its intensity, which remained faithful to her even
after all its memories had turned to pain: "for it seemed as if
this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by the strength of his
affection.... Others seek happiness in their attachments; when they no
longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes. In this they resemble
the rest of the world. But he loved for the sake of loving. No amount
of suffering was sufficient to discourage him. He could enter upon a new
phase, that of woe; but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at.
It would have been indeed a phase of physical agony--for his love was
his life--and delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing
himself a single moment from its domination." [Footnote: LUCRESIA
FLORIANA] Madame Sand never ceased to be for Chopin that being of magic
spells who had snatched him from t