ps by
the gorges of the Piave."

And the spring's delights on the Alpine borders of Lombardy are
described by her _con amore_, in the promised letters:--

The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a
faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud
on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower
mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of
cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta
flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large
banks of pebbles, and the rocky _debris_ which she tears out of the
heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her
days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with
those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from
all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the
snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of sunshine,
formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver,
against the solid blue of the sky.

None of these excursions, however, were ever carried very far. For the
next three months she remained almost entirely stationary at Venice, her
head-quarters. She had taken apartments for herself in the interior of
the city, in a little low-built house, along the narrow, green, and yet
limpid canal, close to the Ponte dei Barcaroli. "There," she tells us,
"alone all the afternoon, never going out except in the evening for a
breath of air, working at night as well, to the song of the tame
nightingales that people all Venetian balconies, I wrote _Andre_,
_Jacques_, _Mattea_, and the first _Lettres d'un Voyageur_."

None can read the latter and suppose that the suffering of the recent
parting was all on one side. The poet continued to correspond with her,
and the consciousness of the pain she had inflicted she was clearly not
sufficiently indifferent herself to support. But neither De Musset nor
any other in whom, through the "prism of enthusiasm," she may have seen
awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary influence on her life.
These were two. Firstly, her children, who although at a distance were
seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their well-being at school and at
home respectively, she was careful to keep herself informed, down to the
minutest particulars, by correspondents in Paris and at Nohant, whence
no oppo