a little the physical man. Live a little as I do; and you will take
your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as
incidents of the day's work and not magnify them into the
mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your
philosophy of universal misery." No advice could have been more
wholesome or more timely. And with what pictures of her own busy
felicity she reenforces her advice! I shall produce three of them
here in order to emphasize that precious thing which George Sand
loved to impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely,
joy, the spontaneous joyousness of her own nature. The first passage
is from a letter of June 14, 1867:

"I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who
am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole
hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance
that I should find there something interesting. I know so well how
to live OUTSIDE OF MYSELF. It hasn't always been like that. I also
was young and subject to indignations. It is over! Since I have
dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a
calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can,
up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at
odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties
return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup
of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against
the ephemeral and relative truth."

The second passage is of June 21:

"I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the
carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a