languages. Naturally I began with that in which your masterpieces are
composed. Till then I had not even read your works. They were the first
I chose. How they impressed, how they startled me! what depths in the
mind of man, in the heart of woman, they revealed to me! But I owned to
you then, and I repeat it now, neither they nor any of the works in
romance and poetry which form the boast of recent French literature
satisfied yearnings for that calm sense of beauty, that divine joy in a
world beyond this world, which you had led me to believe it was the
prerogative of ideal art to bestow. And when I told you this with the
rude frankness you had bid me exercise in talk with you, a thoughtful,
melancholy shade fell over your face, and you said quietly, "You are
right, child; we, the French of our time, are the offspring of
revolutions that settled nothing, unsettled all: we resemble those
troubled States which rush into war abroad in order to re-establish peace
at home. Our books suggest problems to men for reconstructing some
social system in which the calm that belongs to art may be found at last:
but such books should not be in your hands; they are not for the
innocence and youth of women as yet unchanged by the systems which
exist." And the next day you brought me 'l'asso's great poem, the
"Gerusalemme Liberata," and said, smiling, "Art in its calm is here."

You remember that I was then at Sorrento by the order of my physician.
Never shall I forget the soft autumn day when I sat amongst the lonely
rocklets to the left of the town,--the sea before me, with scarce a
ripple; my very heart steeped in the melodies of that poem, so marvellous
for a strength disguised in sweetness, and for a symmetry in which each
proportion blends into the other with the perfectness of a Grecian
statue. The whole place seemed to me filled with the presence of the
poet to whom it had given birth. Certainly the reading of that poem
formed an era in my existence: to this day I cannot acknowledge the