The sweet serenity of Madame Recamier’s nature soothed the more restless and tumultuous spirit of her friend.  The unaffected veneration, too, of one so beautiful touched and gratified the woman of genius.  Still, this intimacy was not unmixed with bitterness for Madame de Stael.  But it troubled only her own heart, not the common friendship.  She continually contrasted Madame Recamier’s beauty with her own plain appearance, her friend’s power of fascination with her own lesser faculty of interesting, and she repeatedly declared that Madame Recamier was the most enviable of human beings.  But in comparing the lives of the two, as they now appear to us, Madame de Stael seems the more fortunate.  If her married life was uncongenial, she had children to love and cherish, to whom she was fondly attached.  Madame Recamier was far more isolated.  Years had made her entirely independent of her husband, and she had no children upon whom to lavish the wealth of her affection.  Her mother’s death left her comparatively alone in the world, for she had neither brother nor sister, and her father seems to have had but little hold on her heart, all her love being lavished on her mother.  She had a host of friends, it is true, but the closest friendship is but a poor substitute for the natural ties of affection.  Both these women sighed for what they had not.  The one yearned for love, the other for the liberty of loving.  Madame Recamier was dependent for her enjoyments on society, while Madame de Stael had rich and manifold resources within herself, which no caprice of friends could materially affect, and no reverse of fortune impair.  Her poetic imagination and creative thought were inexhaustible treasures.  Solitude could never be irksome to her.  Her genius brought with it an inestimable blessing.  It gave her a purpose in life,—­consequently she was never in want of occupation; and if at intervals she bitterly felt that heart-loneliness which Mrs. Browning has so touchingly expressed in verse,—­

    “’My father!’—­thou hast knowledge, only thou! 
    How dreary ’t is for women to sit still
    On winter nights by solitary fires,
    And hear the nations praising them far off,
    Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
    Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
    Which could not beat so in the verse without
    Being present also in the unkissed lips,
    And eyes undried because there’s none to ask
    The reason they grew moist,”—­

in the excitement and ardor of composition such feelings slumbered, while in the honest and pure satisfaction of work well done they were for the time extinguished.  Madame Recamier, though beautiful and beloved, had no such precious compensations.  She depended for her happiness upon her friends, and they who rely upon others for their chief enjoyments must meet with bitter and deep disappointments.  Madame Recamier had great triumphs which secured to her moments of rapture.  When the crowd worshipped her beauty, she probably experienced the same delirium of joy, the same momentary exultation, that a prima donna feels when called before an excited and enthusiastic audience.  But satiety and chagrin surely follow such triumphs, and she lived to feel their hollowness.