Portraits of Celebrated Women (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. MADAME DE SOUZA. A Friend who, after having seen much of the world, has withdrawn from it almost entirely, and who judges from a distance, and'as it were from the shore, the swift whirlpool in which the rest of us are tossing, lately wrote me, apropos of certain rapid estimates I had made of contemporary works, " What you say of our ' sublimities ' interests me extremely. Sublime they assuredly are. What they lack is calm and freshness, a little pure cold water wherewith to cool our burning palates." This quality of freshness and delicacy, this limpidity in emotion and sobriety in speech, this soft and quiet shading, as they disappear on all hands from actual life and the works of imagination now produced, become all the more precious when we encounter them in obscurity, and in those pleasing compositions where they were last reflected. It would be a mistake to suppose that there is aught of weakness or degeneracy in regretting these vanished charms?these flowers which apparently could only blow in the very last days of an order of society now passed away. The softly-tinted pictures of which we speak presuppose a degree of taste and soul-culture which democratic civilization could not have abolished without detriment to itself, if something analogous thereto were not one day to reappear in ourmodern manners. Modern society, when it shall have become a little more settled and better defined, will also have its element of repose, its cool, mysterious nooks, its shades favorable to refined sentiment, a few tolerably ancient forests, a few undiscovered fountains. It will admit into its seemingly uniform framework a thousand varieties of thought, and many a rare form of interior life: otherwise it will be, in one respect, far inferior to the civilization which preceded it, a...