jests still as she writes; from first to last they are the letters of a woman whose tears and laughter lie close together. But her affections-to use her own phrase-are too strong for her peace. She has not relinquished the fight for happiness, but she is learning-first lesson of ultimate defeat-to seek it in memories:

'My imagination chuses to ramble back to the barrier with you, or to see you coming to meet me and my basket of grapes. . . . Bring me then back your barrier-face!'

And if it does not come-September is past, October thereshe will love the author of the Marseillaise-A handsome ' man who plays sweetly on the violin.' Another page and all the lightness has taken flight- My heart longs for your ' return, my love, and only seeks happiness with you.' But he does not return, and in December she is, at best, but a half jester.

If you domay I expect

'Come to me, my dearest friend, husband, father of my child. It is your own maxim to live in the present moment. stay, for God's sake, but tell me the truth. If not, when to see you? and let me not be always looking for you, till I grow sick at heart.'... 'I will live without your assistance.'

So at length the slow scorn her heart has learnt bitterly creeps fully into sight.

'I consider fidelity and constancy as two distinct things, yet the former is necessary to give life to the latter; and such a degree of respect do I think due to myself, that if only probity, which is a good thing in its place, brings you back, never return!-for if a wandering of the heart, or even a caprice of imagination, detains you, there is an end of all my hopes of happiness. I could not forgive it, if I would.'

Despair is a freeman;' dead to hope, she is finding, in all its sharpness, liberty. The man she loved is turned to idols, to money-getting, to vulgar excesses, to the sordid service of gold. Let him alone! And yet, if true hope was buried deep, some counterfeit arises to take its place, and love, for Mary Wollstonecraft, dies hard. Imlay writes, and she finds some comfort,' and the old passionate desire for his love, the want of my heart,' breaks out.

'One thing let me tell you. When we meet again-surely we are to meet !—it must be to part no more. . . . Adieu, adieu. My friend, your friendship is very cold.'

The end verily was near. It was a case of the world versus Mary, and the world-Imlay's sordid world-had

VOL. CXCIII. NO. CCCXCVI.

M M

won. Its triumph is chronicled in the last letter but one of the correspondence:

... Gracious God! It is impossible for me to stifle something like resentment when I receive fresh proofs of your indifference. What I have suffered this last year is not to be forgotten. I have not that happy substitute for wisdom, insensibility; and the lively sympathies which bind me to my fellow-creatures are all of a painful kind. They are the agonies of a broken heart. Pleasure and I have shaken hands. . . . I am weary of travelling, yet seem to have no home-no resting-place to look to. I am strangely cast off. How often, passing through the rocks, I have thought "but for this child, I would lay my head on one of them, and never open my eyes again." .. I do not understand you. It is necessary for you to write more explicitly, and determine on some mode of conduct. .. Decide. Do you fear to strike another blow? We live together, or eternally part.'

They met but once again, a meeting which terminated in her attempt at suicide.

How much the Wollstonecraft letters owe to the tragedy of the circumstances which gave rise to them it is hard to say. But they stand by themselves, and the letters which belong to the most famous love-story of the next generation follow only afar off in their wake.

Mary, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft's subsequent marriage with William Godwin, in the first year of her union with Shelley, finds here and there phrases full of grace and tenderness in the letters occasioned by a temporary suspension of their common home life. Yet, though all the first enthusiasm of youth was alight at their hearts, though their love, no less than that of Mary Wollstonecraft for Imlay, was fanned, it may be, by defiance of the world's conventions, neither in Mary's letters nor in Shelley's responses is there the least echo of the swift passion that colours and discolours the pages where the elder woman mingled her jests with wormwood.

'Dearest Love, I am so out of spirits; I feel so lonely; but we shall meet to-morrow, so I will try to be happy. . . . I received your letter to-night. I wanted one, for I had not received one for nearly two days; but do not think I mean anything by this, my love. I know you took a long, long walk yesterday, and so you could not write; but I, who am at home, who do not walk out, I could write to you all day, love. . . . How you philosophise and reason about love! Do you know, if I had been asked I could not have given one reason in its favour, yet I have as great an opinion as you concerning its exaltedness, and love very tenderly to prove my theory. Adieu for the present. I shall meet you to-morrow, love.

'Your own Mary, who loves you so tenderly.'

'So,' writes Shelley, in reply, 'so my beloved boasts that she is more perfect in the practice than I in the theory of love. Is it thus ? No, sweet Mary, you only meant that you loved me more than you could express; that reasoning was too cold and slow for the rapid fervour of your conceptions. Perhaps, in truth, Peacock had infected me; my disquisitions were cold, my subtleties unmeaningly refined, and I am a harp responsive to every wind; the scented gale of summer can wake it to sweet melody, but rough, cold blasts draw forth discordances and jarring sounds.

'My own love, did I not appear happy to-day? For a few moments I was entranced in most delicious pleasure, yet I was absent and dejected. I knew not when we might meet again, when I might hold you in my arms, and gaze on your dear eyes at will, and snatch momentary kisses in the midst of one happy hour, and sport in security with my entire and unbroken bliss. I was about to return-whither? Oh! I knew not, nor was it matter of concern-from you, from our delightful peace to the simple expectation of felicity. I shall be happy is not so divine as I am. "To be content to let I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' like the poor cat i' the adage," to those who love is feverish agitation and sickening disquietude; and my poor Mary that loves me with such tenderness and truth-is her loneliness no pain to me?'...

'There are moments in your absence, my love, when the bitterness with which I regret the unrecoverable time wasted in unprofitable solitude and worldly cares is a most painful weight; you alone reconcile me to myself and to my beloved hopes. Good night, my excellent love, my own Mary.'

There is no touch, no hint here of the world well lost. Their loves are the loves of seventeen and twenty-two yearold lovers, the loves of a girl and a boy, and Mary, with the brown eyes of her mother, has the more equable blood of her father in her veins, and has been brought up in the abode of philosophy, while Shelley, the poet of the Epipsy'chidion,' has not acquired the art of translating a passion into prose.

6

It would not in truth seem that poets in love, though the Brownings and Victor Hugo may be cited as make-weights on the other side, are more blessed than their lay brethren in the difficult art of the love-epistle. Goethe, in the first ardours of his attachment to Frau von Stein-an attachment evidenced by, according to Schiller's statement, more than a thousand letters-forfeits, surely, most of the attractions of his genius. To give a brief extract-the translation is G. H. Lewes's:

'Wherefore must I plague thee, dearest creature? Wherefore deceive myself and plague thee? We can be nothing to each other, and yet are too much to each other. Believe me, thou art in all things one with me, but because I see things as they are it makes me mad.

Good night, good angel, and good morning. I will see thee no more only . . . Thou knowest all. . . . My heart is ... All I can say is mere folly. In future I shall see thee as men see the

stars.'

...

Nor, to take an instance from a poet of the school most opposed to that of the great German realist of his day, was Keats more fortunate as presented to us in the character of lover. Mr. Buxton Forman has rendered him the doubtful homage of publishing the letters to Fanny Brawne-letters which had not appeared in Lord Houghton's Life. Rarely can the indiscretion of admiration have gone further. They are the letters of a man sick in body, unnerved in heart, and fevered in mind. There is scarcely a page in the whole correspondence to justify its surrender to the public. Its only interest is derived from the fact that they are the letters of one of the greatest poets-if beauty of imagination and sweetness of sound be counted for greatness-of his century; and the sentence in which (Letter xxxi.) Keats asserts his intention at some future time' of offering the correspondence to Murray comes like a side thrust of irony. In love with a woman who, willing or unwilling, blameless or faulty, brought small joy and much misery--for myself I have been a martyr the whole time,' he writes-into the last melancholy years of the poet's life, it remains a volume whose claim is not for existence but oblivion. And in the land where all books are forgotten may it find a grave, and may criticism, with memories of Hamlet and Tristram Shandy somewhat coupled and confused, write on its tomb, to borrow Sterne's phrase, no more than these three words of inscription, serving both for epitaph and elegy, "Alas, ""poor-Keats!""

But if poets such as Shelley and Keats, of whom surely we might have anticipated better things, appear in this matter but as common men, golden indeed as love-poets, but mere chimney-sweepers in respect of letter-writing, the cloister is prepared to indemnify, and more than indemnify, us for their shortcomings.

When, in the month of May 1164, Héloïse, Superior of the convent of the Paraclete, was borne to the sepulchre where twenty-two years earlier she had laid the body of Abélard-lover, troubadour, philosopher, theologian, and founder of the Order, tout ce qu'il y avoit de considérable dans la province, soit dans l'église, soit dans l'épée, soit dans la robe, honorèrent de leur présence ses funérailles.' And though it is not mentioned by her biographer, there

were, we may be confident, lovers not a few to mourn the death of the greatest of their race. Epouse sans mari, une veuve avant sa mort, une mère sans enfans, une religieuse 'sans vocation,' her letters retain their place amongst the classics of literature. They are a gospel-book of passion to which the seven centuries which have elapsed since her burial have added no single chapter from the hand of woman that does not mark a declension in strength-a strength imparted by the brilliance of her intellectual powers of thought to the expression of her emotional powers of feeling.

How much the convent walls may have conduced to the intensity as well as the durability of the long love in which Héloïse lived and died is a question. Marianna Alcaforada, author of the five authentic letters that gave their title, 'Lettres portugaises,' as a generic term to many subsequent compositions, is eager to impress upon her lover the aids to constancy afforded by the religious life:

'On devrait plutôt s'attacher à elles [les religieuses] qu'aux autres femmes. Rien ne les empêche de penser incessamment à leur passion : elles ne sont point détournées par mille choses qui dissipent et qui occupent dans le monde.'

But the cases of the Franciscan nun of Beja and the Abbess of the Paraclete are not parallel. Characters and circumstances, the two women and the two lovers, were wholly alien to one another, and if the letters of both reach the high-water mark of passion, it is a high-water mark of divided seas. Self-the undisciplined youth of fierce southern blood-self, wavering between love and hate, forgetful that anything exists except her love, her jealousy and her despair -self, in short, not the Don Juan of the plot, the Marquis de Chamilly, is writ large upon every page. Marianna is the central point of Marianna's thought. For Héloïse every sentence is a self-surrender, an act of self-effacement. If she takes shame that 'parmi les épouses d'un Dieu' she finds herself' la servante d'un homme,' she at least serves her master with a pure and selfless adoration, a complete self-renunciation, the brides of Christ might emulate with envy. If to the very end it is Abélard whose feet she follows, she follows him upon the thorny road which leads to God:

'Lorsque tu es allé à Dieu, je t'ai suivi, que dis-je? je t'ai précédé. . . Si tu ne m'en tiens aucun compte, vois combien le sacrifice aura été