Not the less had she the power and scope for all the loftiest capacities granted to our clay.

Equal was her enthusiasm for her idol; equal, had she been equally tried, would have been her generosity, her devotion:--greater, be sure, her courage; more inalienable her worship; more unsullied by selfish purposes and sordid views.

Time, change, misfortune, ingratitude, would have left her the same! What state could fall, what liberty decay, if the zeal of man's noisy patriotism were as pure as the silent loyalty of a woman's love?
In them everything was young!--the heart unchilled, unblighted,--that fulness and luxuriance of life's life which has in it something of divine.

At that age, when it seems as if we could never die, how deathless, how flushed and mighty as with the youngness of a god, is all that our hearts create! Our own youth is like that of the earth itself, when it peopled the woods and waters with divinities; when life ran riot, and yet only gave birth to beauty;--all its shapes, of poetry,--all its airs, the melodies of Arcady and Olympus! The Golden Age never leaves the world: it exists still, and shall exist, till love, health, poetry, are no more; but only for the young! If I now dwell, though but for a moment, on this interlude in a drama calling forth more masculine passions than that of love, it is because I foresee that the occasion will but rarely recur.

If I linger on the description of Irene and her hidden affection, rather than wait for circumstances to portray them better than the author's words can, it is because I foresee that that loving and lovely image must continue to the last rather a shadow than a portrait,--thrown in the background, as is the real destiny of such natures, by bolder figures and more gorgeous colours; a something whose presence is rather felt than seen, and whose very harmony with the whole consists in its retiring and subdued repose..