the Christian ideal with the
earthly grace and beauty of the mythological deities of Greece. For very
many years she cherished this fantasy, finding there the scope she
sought for her aspirations after superhuman excellence. It is hardly too
much to say that the Christianity which had been expressly left out in
her teaching she invented for herself. She erected a woodland altar in
the recesses of a thicket to this imaginary object of her adoration, and
it is a characteristic trait that the sacrifices she chose to offer
there were the release of birds and butterflies that had been taken
prisoners--as a symbolical oblation most welcome to a divinity whose
essential attributes were infinite mercy and love. It will be remembered
that a somewhat similar anecdote is related of the youthful Goethe.

Aurore, as the years went on, had grown sincerely fond of Madame Dupin;
but her mother still held the foremost place in her heart, and she had
never ceased to cherish the belief that if they two could live together
she would be perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply irritated her
grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl
something of the real motive for insisting on this separation--namely,
that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's
well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's
existence apart from that of her parent. Sooner or later such a
revelation must have been made; but made as it was, thus precipitately,
in a moment of jealous anger, the chief result was of necessity to cause
a painful and dangerous shock to the sensitive young mind. It brought
about an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbidden all at once to
respect what she had loved most, and must continue to love, in spite of
all. On the injurious effects of the over-agitation to which she was
subjected in her childhood she has laid much stress in her remarkable
work, "The Story of My Life." Much of this book, written when she was
between forty and fifty, reads like a romance; and had a certain amount
of retrospective imagination entered into the treatment of these
reminiscences it would not be surprising. The tendency to impart
poetical color and significance to whatever was capable of taking it was
her mastering impulse, and may sometimes have led her to lose the
distinction between fancy and reality, especially as by her own
confession her memory was never her strong point. But she had an
e