he northern capitals of Europe. She liked even
Russia; she saw good everywhere, something to praise and enjoy wherever
she went. Moscow and St. Petersburg were equally interesting,--the old
and the new, the Oriental magnificence of the one, the stupendous
palaces and churches of the other. Romanzoff, Orloff, the Empress
Elizabeth, and the Emperor Alexander himself gave her distinguished
honors and hospitalities, and she saw and recorded their greatness, and
abandoned herself to pleasures which were new.

After a delightful winter in Stockholm, she sailed for England, where
she arrived in safety, 1813, twenty years after her first visit, and in
the ninth of her exile. Her reception in the highest circles was
enthusiastic. She was recognized as the greatest literary woman who had
lived. The Prince Regent sought her acquaintance; the greatest nobles
feted her in their princely palaces. At the house of the Marquis of
Lansdowne, at Lord Jersey's, at Rogers's literary dinners, at the
reunions of Holland House, everywhere, she was admired and honored. Sir
James Mackintosh, the idol and oracle of English society at that time,
pronounced her the most intellectual woman who had adorned the
world,--not as a novelist and poet merely, but as philosopher and
critic, grappling with the highest questions that ever tasked the
intellect of man. Byron alone stood aloof; he did not like strong-minded
women, any more than Goethe did, especially if they were not beautiful.
But he was constrained to admire her at last. Nobody could resist the
fascination and brilliancy of her conversation. It is to be regretted
that she did not write a book on England, which on the whole she
admired, although it was a little too conventional for her. But she was
now nearly worn out by the excitements and the sorrows of her life. She
was no longer young. Her literary work was done. And she had to resort
to opium to rally from the exhaustion of her nervous energies.

On the fall of Napoleon, Madame de Stael returned to Paris,--the city
she loved so well; the city so dear to all Frenchmen and to all
foreigners, to all gay people, to all intellectual people, to all
fashionable people, to all worldly people, to all pious people,--to them
the centre of modern civilization. Exile from this city has ever been
regarded as a great calamity,--as great as exile was to Romans, even to
Cicero. See with what eagerness Thiers himself returned to this charmed
capital when pe