hrough her work
as a whole.

In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all
that she ever produced. Even three or four only out of her many books
might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say,
the _Lettres d'un Voyageur, Mauprat, Francois le Champi_,[310] and a
story which I was glad to see Mr. Myers,[311] in his appreciative
notice of Madame Sand, single out for praise,--_Valvedre_.[312] In these
may be found all the principal elements of their author's strain: the
cry of agony and revolt, the trust in nature and beauty, the aspiration
towards a purged and renewed human society.

Of George Sand's strain, during forty years, these are the grand
elements. Now it is one of them which appears most prominently, now it
is another. The cry of agony and revolt is in her earlier work only, and
passes away in her later. But in the evolution of these three elements,
--the passion of agony and revolt, the consolation from nature and from
beauty, the ideas of social renewal,--in the evolution of these is
George Sand and George Sand's life and power. Through their evolution
her constant motive declares and unfolds itself, that motive which we
have set forth above: "the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none
other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it." This is the
motive, and through these elements is its evolution: an evolution
pursued, moreover, with the most unfailing resolve, the most absolute
sincerity.

The hour of agony and revolt passed away for George Sand, as it passed
away for Goethe, as it passes away for their readers likewise. It passes
away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or
less stormy, of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of
George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can
no more forget them than they can forget _Werther_[313]. George Sand
speaks somewhere of her "days of _Corinne_."[314] Days of _Valentine_,
many of us may in like manner say,--days of _Valentine_, days of
_Lelia_[315], days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the
books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the
sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our
memory and haunt the ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they
come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind through the forest,
like the breaking of the waves on the seashore. Lelia in her ce