universal order, weighed against which individual sufferings,
without ceasing to be a ground of merit, cease to constitute a right
of revolt. ... Resignation, in the true, the philosophical, the
Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the
laws essential to the social order; it is a free adherence to order,
a sacrifice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and
of one's personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a
human caprice, but to the exigencies of the common weal, which
subsists only by the concord of individual liberty with obedient
passions."

Well, resigned in the sense of defeated, George Sand never became;
nor did she, perhaps, ever wholly acquiesce in that scheme of things
which M. Caro impressively designates as "the universal order." Yet
with age, the abandonment of many distractions, the retreat to
Nohant, the consolations of nature, and her occupation with tales of
pastoral life, beginning with La Mare au Diable, there develops
within her, there diffuses itself around her, there appears in her
work a charm like that which falls upon green fields from the level
rays of the evening sun after a day of storms. It is not the charm,
precisely, of resignation; it is the charm of serenity--the serenity
of an old revolutionist who no longer expects victory in the morning
yet is secure in her confidence of a final triumph, and still more
secure in the goodness of her cause. "A hundred times in life," she
declares, "the good that one does seems to serve no immediate
purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of
well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish." At the
outset of her career we compared her with Shelley. In her last
phase, she reminds us rather of the authors of Far from the Madding
Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once, too, a