hnson, Burke, Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wilkes, Garrick, Walpole, Sydney
Smith, were most remarkable in their later years, after they had read
everything and seen everybody. But Madame de Stael was brilliant in
conversation from her youth. She was the delight of every circle, the
admiration of the most gifted men,--not for her beauty, for she was not
considered beautiful, but for her wit, her vivacity, her repartee, her
animated and sympathetic face, her electrical power; for she could
kindle, inspire, instruct, or bewitch. She played, she sang, she
discoursed on everything,--a priestess, a sibyl, full of inspiration,
listened to as an oracle or an idol. "To hear her," says Sismondi, "one
would have said that she was the experience of many souls mingled into
one, I looked and listened with transport. I discovered in her features
a charm superior to beauty; and if I do not hear her words, yet her
tones, her gestures, and her looks convey to me her meaning." It is said
that though her features were not beautiful her eyes were
remarkable,--large, dark, lustrous, animated, flashing, confiding, and
bathed in light. They were truly the windows of her soul; and it was her
soul, even more than her intellect, which made her so interesting and so
great. I think that intellect without soul is rather repulsive than
otherwise, is cold, critical, arrogant, cynical,--something from which
we flee, since we find no sympathy and sometimes no toleration from it.
The soul of Madame de Stael immeasurably towered above her intellect,
great as that was, and gave her eloquence, fervor, sincerity,
poetry,--intensified her genius, and made her irresistible.

It was this combination of wit, sympathy, and conversational talent
which made Madame de Stael so inordinately fond of society,--to satisfy
longings and cravings that neither Nature nor books nor home could fully
meet. With all her genius and learning she was a restless woman; and
even friendship, for which she had a great capacity, could not bind her,
or confine her long to any one place but Paris, which was to her the
world,--not for its shops, or fashions, or churches, or museums and
picture-galleries, or historical monuments and memories, but for those
coteries where blazed the great wits of the age, among whom she too
would shine and dazzle and inspire. She was not without heart, as her
warm and lasting friendships attest; but the animating passion of her
life was love of admiration, which