in poetic souls, mysticism and doubt often reign side by side.  Jean Jacques himself furnishes a striking example of this, and you know what sympathies he stirred among priests and nobles, even when he was chastising them so unmercifully.  What miracles may not conviction work when helped by sublime eloquence!  Edmee had drunk of this living fount with all the eagerness of an ardent soul.  In her rare visits to Paris she had sought for spirits in sympathy with her own.  There, however, she had found so many shades of opinion, so little harmony, and—­despite the prevailing fashion—­so many ineradicable prejudices, that she had returned with a yet deeper love to her solitude and her poetic reveries under the old oaks in the park.  She would even then speak of her illusions, and—­with a good sense beyond her years, perhaps, too, beyond her sex—­she refused all opportunities of direct intercourse with the philosophers whose writings made up her intellectual life.

“I am somewhat of a Sybarite,” she would say with a smile.  “I would rather have a bouquet of roses arranged for me in a vase in the early morning, than go and gather them myself from out their thorns in the heat of the sun.”

As a fact, this remark about her sybaritism was only a jest.  Brought up in the country, she was strong, active, brave, and full of life.  To all her charms of delicate beauty she united the energy of physical and moral health.  She was the proud-spirited and fearless girl, no less than the sweet and affable mistress of the house.  I often found her haughty and disdainful.  Patience and the poor of the district never found her anything but modest and good-natured.

Edmee loved the poets almost as much as the transcendental philosophers.  In her walks she always carried a book in her hand.  One day when she had taken Tasso with her she met Patience, who, as was his wont, inquired minutely into both author and subject.  Edmee thereupon had to give him an account of the Crusades.  This was not the most difficult part of her task.  Thanks to the stores of information derived from the abbe and to his prodigious memory for facts, Patience had a passable knowledge of the outlines of universal history.  But what he had great trouble in grasping was the connection and difference between epic poetry and history.  At first he was indignant at the inventions of the poets, and declared that such impostures ought never to have been allowed.  Then, when he had realized that epic poetry, far from leading generations into error, only raised heroic deeds to vaster proportions and a more enduring glory, he asked how it was that all important events had not been sung by the bards, and why the history of man had not been embodied in a popular form capable of impressing itself on every mind without the help of letters.  He begged Edmee to explain to him a stanza of Jerusalem Delivered.  As he took a fancy to it, she read him a canto in French.  A few days later she read him another,