Swetchine felt her natural relations of duty and submission transmuted into those of vivid admiration and devotion. "I fully sympathize," she writes to her earliest bosom-friend, "with the vivacity of your admiration for our dear emperor. What a happiness to be able to eulogize with truth! Let us hope we are in the aurora of a most beautiful day for Russia. How pleased I am at having always seen in his soul that which this day shows itself with a glory so fair and so pure! He is a true hero of humanity. He seems in his conduct to realize all my dreams of moral dignity; and I find, at last, in this union of religious sentiments and liberal ideas, the longsought resemblance of the type I carry in my mind, and which has hitherto been qualified as fantastic, the creation of a too sanguine imagination. In him we see, that, even on the throne, in the wild tumult of all interests, of all passions, one can remain man, Christian, philosopher; pursue the wisest and most generous plans; and carry into his actions every thing that is beautiful, from the highest justice to the most touching modesty."

Alexander testified his respect and regret, when Madame Swetchine departed to reside in Paris, by asking her to be his correspondent. The correspondence was continued until his death, ten years afterwards. The Emperor Nicholas, on his accession, restored to Madame Swetchine all her letters; and she allowed an eminent statesman, in 1845, to read the whole collection. After her death, no trace of it was to be found among her papers. It must possess an intense interest; and it is to be hoped that it still exists, and may yet one day see the light.

Perhaps the most intimate and truly devoted of all the friends of Madame Swetchine was that accomplished member of the French Academy whose biographic and editorial labors have erected such an attractive and perdurable monument to her memory, the Count Alfred de Falloux. The soul of reverence, gratitude, and love exhales in his sentences when he writes of her. After describing what "she was to all who had the inexpressible happiness of knowing her," he adds, "and this she will now be to all who shall read her;

and death will but give to her words one consecration more." But the modesty of M. de Falloux has not given the public her letters to him, and has kept his personal relations with her much in the background. We are left to guess what the measure and the activity of their friendship were from indirect indications.

On the whole, possibly because of the editor's reticence as to himself, we are left to believe, that the one chief friend who held the pre-eminent place in the heart of Madame Swetchine, during the last twenty-five years of her life, was Father Lacordaire, the illustrious Catholic preacher. A complete picture of this wise, pure, ardent, and unfaltering friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not, in all the annals of human affection, where to find the account of a friendship between a man and a woman more spotless, more blessed, more morally satisfying, than this. The volume which preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius and power in society, and for the quantity and quality of their inner life, less of solid instruction than of romantic interest. life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic; the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book before us. It would be grateful to our feelings, useful for our readers, to dwell on this part of our subject through many pages; but the narrowing space compels us to hurry to a close.

full, not The inner

Madame Swetchine was endowed from birth with the material, the physiological conditions, for a great and original character, force competent to the finest and the grandest things, with an over-bias of that force to the brain. For long periods, she was compelled to walk in her chamber from seven to eight hours a day, to avoid intolerable nervous pressures and pains. At sixty-six, she wrote to one of her friends, "My interior life sterilizes itself by reason of superabundance; the too great fulness causes an incessant restlessness. I cannot

give body to the multitude of confused ideas which crowd each other, interweave, and suffocate me for want of articulation." This profuse force, which continued throughout her life, enabled her to achieve an amount of work, and acquire a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, truly astonishing. Her youthful education, with the many difficult accomplishments she mastered, was the first resource for the occupation of her teeming energy. The second was the discharge of her domestic and public duties, with as much discretion and skill as if her sole ambition were to be a faultless housekeeper and member of the social order. The third was friendship, to whose genial duties of visiting and correspondence she devoted herself with a fulness and an ardor as passionate as they were genuine. And yet there remained a surplusage of unappropriated soul, whose vague and constant action distressed her. She entered on an extensive study of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy. Her biographer says, that scarcely an important work on these subjects appeared in Europe for fifty years with whose contents she did not familiarize herself, pen in hand. She interspersed these arduous labors by a systematic application to philanthropic works, personally visiting the sick and the poor, and ministering to their wants. And still her force was unexhausted: she had more faculty and strength longing to be used, and disturbing her with mysterious solicitations; a solitary activity, without aliment; a wheel for ever revolving in a void; a burning ardor, which, in the absence of sufficing affections below, turned upward, and became a subtile mysticism. When practical duty, friendship, literature, philosophy, and charitable deeds had failed to absorb and satisfy her, plainly there was but one resource left, religion. She entered on the path to God and his fellowship, the sublime way of the life of perfection. She entered on it with an extraordinary capacity for ascending through the various degrees of perception, feeling, and transfusion; and, at the same time, with a power of rational poise which kept her experience of piety from the two extremes of mawkishness and delirium. Such balancing good sense and sobriety, such freedom from every thing morbid or bizarre,

Some

combined with so much thoroughness of faith and so much fervor and abandon, we know not where else to find. hearts open downward, and send their exciting drench through the body; hers opened upward, and sent its pure vapor aloft into the mind to wear celestial colors. Her head was a higher heart, playing off intelligence and affection transmuted into each other.

The greatness of Madame Swetchine is shown by the just gradations of her loyalty and devotion to the ascending scale of human interests, the enlarging standards of good and authority. With her, the rank of a motive for determining her conduct depended on the breadth and height of the moral principles represented, and not on the personal closeness of the consequences involved. Among the claims to her love and service, self-regard stood lowest in the estimate of her conscience; regard for family and friends, higher; for the nation, higher yet; for universal truth and right, highest of all. That which merely concerned her own gratification she considered least entitled to command; that which concerned all humanity, or symbolized God, was clothed with supreme sovereignty in her sight. This is the true order of grandeur in character: those in whom exclusively personal motives are strongest, are the basest men; those in whom disinterested motives are strongest, motives graduated in power by the elevation of the intrinsic authority represented, or the extent of the good and evil implicated,-are the noblest men. This is the reason why Madame Swetchine, although a stranger to party spirit or sectarian narrowness, abhorring the yokes of coteries, yet always felt so zealous an interest in the social phenomena of the time, in the leading literature, in the institutions and rulers of the State, in the fortunes of the Church, in the eternal truths of philosophy and religion. Her letter to De Tocqueville, on the intelligent interest women ought to take in the politics of their country, is a paper most masterly in thought and expression. We wish every cultivated woman in America would read this impressive statement of the case, ponder its reasoning, and imbibe its moral tone.

In the charming treatise on "Old Age," from the pen of

Madame Swetchine, a piece of serene poetry and impast sioned wisdom, a critic complains that she rather transfigures the subject than shows it. But, however much she may have transfigured it in description, in person and experience she has shown it in the most beautiful form of truth of which it is susceptible. Year by year, to the very end, she became ever wiser, calmer, more influential, more honored and beloved, more saintly and content. Her religious abnegation grew perfect; her peace deepened; her active benevolence broadened; her spirit, always genially tolerant, acquired a mellower ripeness. In relation to one of her acquaintances, she says, "The last time I saw him, I was struck by a kind of rigidity, of bitterness, a want of charity in his judgments which injured their justice; for the more I see, the more I am convinced that we must love in order to know." The detestable Rochefoucauld said, "Old age is the hell of women." For Madame Swetchine it had much more of paradise, as the rich ardor and impetuosity of her youth slowly moderated, and, by judicious oversight, she trained her powers into harmony among themselves and submission to God. In her earlier years, she was so eager and restless, so avid of knowing and seeing, that she said she would have been delighted to start for India, with no other aim than that of gratifying an insatiable curiosity. In her later years, with a quiet strength of aspiration, she pursued that journey to perfection on whose way, as she said, noble and useful actions are the refreshments, reason the guide, self-contentment the comrade and the goal. So unwearied was her inspection of the capacities and exposures of her own character, so strict and varied her discipline and culture, that she committed the singular error, at last, of believing that she originally had little force of character, and that nearly all she possessed was acquired. Her persevering toil for perfection was no morbid waste of time and energy in an endless puttering over herself, or in sentimental extravagances it was a rational and conscientious study to outgrow defects, tone down excesses, and improve excellences. Her piety was an assimilating principle, and no exhaling vapor. Early learning that for true and enduring peace we must