for I go to bed early, and then they hasten to take their places
around the hearth-stone of Madame Sand.

Without doubt Madame Sand will in this path prove her intellectual
omnipotence, but yet she will please less, because she will be less
original. She will fancy she augments her power by venturing into the
depths of these reveries, beneath which we deplorable common mortals
are buried, and she will be mistaken. In fact she is much superior
to this extravagance, this vagueness, this presumptuous balderdash.
At the same time that a person endowed with a rare but too flexible
faculty, should be guarded against follies of the higher order, he
ought also to be warned that fantastic compositions, subjective or
intimate, painting (so runs the jargon) are restricted; that their
course is in youth; that its springs are drying up every instant, and
that after a number of productions the writer finishes with nothing
but weak repetitions.

Is it very likely that Madame Sand will always find the same charm
in what she now composes? Will not the merit and the enthusiasm of
twenty lose their value in her mind as the works of my first days are
depreciated in mine? There is nothing changeless except the labors of
the antique muse, and they are sustained by a nobility of manners, a
beauty of language, and a majesty of sentiments, which belong to the
entire human species. The fourth book of the Eneid remains forever
exposed to the admiration of men because it is suspended in heaven.
The ships bearing the founder of the Roman Empire,--Dido, the
foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after having announced
Hannibal:

Exoriare aliquis nostius exossibus ulta.--