life and form. One evening after her return to Paris, by an effort so
involuntary that it seemed to her no effort, she had commenced a tale,--
without plan, without method, without knowing in one page what would fill
the next. Her slight fingers hurried on as if, like the pretended spirit
manifestations, impelled by an invisible agency without the pale of the
world. She was intoxicated by the mere joy of inventing ideal images.
In her own special art an elaborate artist, here she had no thought of
art; if art was in her work, it sprang unconsciously from the harmony
between herself and her subject,--as it is, perhaps, with the early
soarings of the genuine lyric poets, in contrast to the dramatic. For
the true lyric poet is intensely personal, intensely subjective. It is
himself that he expresses, that he represents; and he almost ceases to be
lyrical when he seeks to go out of his own existence into that of others
with whom he has no sympathy, no rapport. This tale was vivid with
genius as yet untutored,--genius in its morning freshness, full of
beauties, full of faults. Isaura distinguished not the faults from the
beauties. She felt only a vague persuasion that there was a something
higher and brighter--a something more true to her own idiosyncrasy--than
could be achieved by the art that "sings other people's words to other
people's music." From the work thus commenced she had now paused; and it
seemed to her fancies that between her inner self and the scene without,
whether in the skies and air and sunset, or in the abodes of men
stretching far and near till lost amid the roofs and domes of the great
city, she had fixed and riveted the link of a sympathy hitherto
fluctuating, unsubstantial, evanescent, undefined. Absorbed in her
revery, she did not notice the deepening of the short twilight, till the
servant entering drew the curtains between her and the world without, and
placed the lamp on the table beside her. Then she turned away with a
restless sigh; her eyes fell on the manuscript, but the charm of it was
gone. A sentiment of distrust in its worth had crept into her thoughts,