[Footnote 123:  In the account of this visit to Copet in his Memoranda, he spoke in high terms of the daughter of his hostess, the present Duchess de Broglie, and, in noticing how much she appeared to be attached to her husband, remarked that “Nothing was more pleasing than to see the developement of the domestic affections in a very young woman.”  Of Madame de Stael, in that Memoir, he spoke thus:—­“Madame de Stael was a good woman at heart and the cleverest at bottom, but spoilt by a wish to be—­she knew not what.  In her own house she was amiable; in any other person’s, you wished her gone, and in her own again.”]

[Footnote 124:  Upon the same occasion, indeed, he wrote some verses in a spirit not quite so generous, of which a few of the opening lines is all I shall give:—­

    “And thou wert sad—­yet I was not with thee! 
      And thou wert sick—­and yet I was not near. 
    Methought that Joy and Health alone could be
      Where I was not, and pain and sorrow here. 
    And is it thus?—­it is as I foretold,
      And shall be more so:—­” &c. &c.
]

* * * * *

“EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.

    “Could I remount the river of my years
    To the first fountain of our smiles and tears,
    I would not trace again the stream of hours
    Between their outworn banks of wither’d flowers,
    But bid it flow as now—­until it glides
    Into the number of the nameless tides. * * *
    What is this Death?—­a quiet of the heart? 
    The whole of that of which we are a part? 
    For Life is but a vision—­what I see
    Of all which lives alone is life to me,
    And being so—­the absent are the dead,
    Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread
    A dreary shroud around us, and invest
    With sad remembrances our hours of rest. 
      “The absent are the dead—­for they are cold,
    And ne’er can be what once we did behold;
    And they are changed, and cheerless,—­or if yet
    The unforgotten do not all forget,
    Since thus divided—­equal must it be
    If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea;
    It may be both—­but one day end it must
    In the dark union of insensate dust. 
      “The under-earth inhabitants—­are they
    But mingled millions decomposed to clay? 
    The ashes of a thousand ages spread
    Wherever man has trodden or shall tread? 
    Or do they in their silent cities dwell
    Each in his incommunicative cell? 
    Or have they their own language? and a sense
    Of breathless being?—­darken’d and intense
    As midnight in her solitude?—­Oh Earth! 
    Where are the past?—­and wherefore had they birth? 
    The dead are thy inheritors—­and we
    But bubbles on thy surface; and the key
    Of thy profundity is in the grave,
    The ebon portal of thy peopled cave,
    Where I would walk in spirit, and behold
    Our elements resolved to things untold,
    And fathom hidden wonders, and explore
    The essence of great bosoms now no more.” * *