’Could a word from me avail you, I would say, that I have firm
    faith that nature cannot be false to her child, who has shown
    such an unalterable faith in her piety towards her.’

* * * * *

’These tones of my dear ——­’s lyre are of the noblest.  Will they sound purely through her experiences?  Will the variations be faithful to the theme?  Not always do those who most devoutly long for the Infinite, know best how to modulate their finite into a fair passage of the eternal Harmony.

    ’How many years was it the cry of my spirit,—­

  “Give, give, ye mighty Gods! 
  Why do ye thus hold back?”—­

and, I suppose, all noble young persons think for the time that they would have been more generous than the Olympians.  But when we have learned the high lesson to deserve,—­that boon of manhood,—­we see they esteemed us too much, to give what we had not earned.’

The following passages from her journal and her letters are sufficiently descriptive, each in its way, of her strong affections.

’At Mr. G.’s we looked over prints, the whole evening, in peace.  Nothing fixed my attention so much as a large engraving of Madame Recamier in her boudoir.  I have so often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame De Stael.

    ’It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and
    a man with a man.  I like to be sure of it, for it is the same
    love which angels feel, where—­

      ’"Sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib.”

’It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes; only it is purely intellectual and spiritual.  Its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek in another being what it finds not in itself.  Thus the beautiful seek the strong, and the strong the beautiful; the mute seeks the eloquent, &c.; the butterfly settles always on the dark flower.  Why did Socrates love Alcibiades?  Why did Koerner love Schneider?  How natural is the love of Wallenstein for Max; that of De Stael for De Recamier; mine for ——.  I loved ——­, for a time, with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel.  Her face was always gleaming before me; her voice was always echoing in my ear; all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image.  This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess; it was the carbuncle which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature.  She loved me, too, though not so much, because her nature was “less high, less grave, less large, less deep.”  But she loved more tenderly, less passionately.  She loved me, for I well remember her suffering when she first could feel my faults, and knew one part of the exquisite veil rent away; how she wished to stay apart, and weep the whole day.

* * * * *