came disinterested;
vanity and ambition having, in one of her sex, nothing to gain by it.
But in political matters it seems hard for a poet to do right. If, like
Goethe, he holds aloof in great crises, he is branded for it as a
traitor and a bad patriot. The battle of Leipzig is being fought, and he
sits tranquilly writing the epilogue for a play. If, like George Sand,
he throws the whole weight of his enthusiastic eloquence into what he
believes to be the right scale, it is ten to one that his power, which
knows nothing of caution and patience, may do harm to the cause he has
at heart.

Madame Sand rested her hopes for a better state of things, for the
redemption of France from political corruption, for the amelioration of
the condition of the working classes, and reform of social institutions
in general, on the advent to power of those placed at the head of
affairs by the collapse of the government of Louis Philippe, a crisis
long threatened, long prepared, and become inevitable.

"The whole system," wrote Heine prophetically of the existing monarchy,
five years before its fall, "is not worth a charge of powder, if indeed
some day a charge of powder does not blow it up." February, 1848, saw
the explosion, the flight of the Royal Family, and the formation of a
Provisional Government, with Lamartine at its head.

It is hard to realize in the present day, when we contemplate these
events through the sobering light of the deplorable sequel, how immense
and wide-spreading was the enthusiasm that at this particular juncture
seemed to put the fervent soul of a George Sand or an Armand Barbes into
the most lukewarm and timid. "More than one," writes Madame d'Agoult,
"who for the last twenty years had been scoffing at every grand thought,
let himself be won by the general emotion." The prevailing impression
can have fallen little short of the conviction that a sort of millennium
was at hand for mankind in general and the French in particular, and
that all human ills would disappear because a bad government had been
got rid of, and that without such scenes of blood and strife as had
disfigured previous revolutions.

The first task was firmly to establish a better one in its place. Madame
Sand, though with a strong perception of the terrible difficulties
besetting a ministry which, to quote her own words, would need, in order
to acquit itself successfully, "the genius of a Napoleon and the heart
of Christ," never relaxed an