George Sand
speaks somewhere of her "days of _Corinne_."[314] Days of _Valentine_,
many of us may in like manner say,--days of _Valentine_, days of
_Lelia_[315], days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the
books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the
sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our
memory and haunt the ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they
come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind through the forest,
like the breaking of the waves on the seashore. Lelia in her cell on the
mountain of the Camaldoli--
"Sibyl, Sibyl forsaken; spirit of the days of old, joined to a brain
which rebels against the divine inspiration; broken lyre, mute
instrument, whose tones the world of to-day, if it heard them, could not
understand, but yet in whose depth the eternal harmony murmurs
imprisoned; priestess of death, I, I who feel and know that before now I
have been Pythia, have wept before now, before now have spoken, but who
cannot recollect, alas, cannot utter the word of healing! Yes, yes! I
remember the cavern of truth and the access of revelation; but the word
of human destiny, I have forgotten it; but the talisman of deliverance,
it is lost from my hand.
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