THE DYING ACTRESS.

BY HELEN HAMILTON.

The sunlight through the purple curtains streaming,
Flushes the room with splendour-low she lies,
Who yester-even in her mimic woe

Drew tears of sympathy from manhood's eyes.
In thund'rous measure rolled the wild applause,
And rarest flowers round her footsteps fell-
Flowers but given her last couch to strew,

Applause that rose for her a fitting knell,
For she is dying. Her quick-throbbing heart
Telleth how fast Life's ebbing tide is flowing,
Though leaving every radiant charm unharmed,
Like one forgetting rarest gems in going.

"My doom is spoken," so the deep-breathed words Dropped from her anguished lips," and I must die! I shall no more with Genius' mighty power

Wake the wild thrilling of man's ecstasy.
My life is counted not by days, but hours-

Its sunny hopes, its rosy dreams are o'er;
They say that quiet may my hours prolong;
Too soon will rest be mine for evermore.
And now for action. Break not yet, O heart!
For ere my name is stricken from Life's page
I would enact a royal part once more-

Death my spectator, and the world my stage!
Bring me the robes I triumphed in last night,

And clasp their folds with pearls pale and rare;
Twine yonder chain of gems about my neck;

Let diamonds star the midnight of my hair.
Fling wide the casement. Let the sunlight gild
This gorgeous room with floods of gleaming gold;
Let the soft breath of rosy summer come

To whisper of the sweets her arms infold.
Scatter bright flowers till the air grows faint
With the rich perfume of their gentle breath;
Let nought within this bright apartment, save
Its inmate, tell that here abideth Death!"

So spake the lady. Her commands obeyed,

She stood up in the sunlight-flooded room,
Wealth all around-youth, beauty on her brow-
Thus garlanded with rich gifts for the tomb.
Slowly, with jewelled hands, she swept apart
The ebon splendours of her silken hair,
While from her lips, as from a breaking lute,

Came the low thrilling accents of despair.
"Farewell, farewell to ye, O Youth and Beauty!
Ye light companions of my sunny years,
Not from me ye depart, but I must leave ye,
And leave the glorious art I held so dear;
Must leave Fame's proudest laurels all ungathered,
Leave Love with all his sweetest lays unsung.
Alas! why must my funeral knell be tolled

Ere yet the noontide chime of life is rung?
So young, so beautiful, so loved-to die!

Couldst thou not gather fading blooms, O Death?
Why must the blossom of my young life wither
Beneath the chilling of thine icy breath ?

A SONG.

Three ripe apples grew red on a tree, But the little birds came with chirrup and call; With chirrup and call they ate them up all— Red apples for them, withered leaflets for me, And my heart lies dead in the shadow.

No sooner

THE PARISIAN BIRD-CHARMER.-Paris, setting the fashion of the world, is at the same time the paradise of oddities. The man who most of all excites the wonder and delight of the habitues of the Champs Elysees, is a queer old gentleman, in poor, but clean snuff-coloured dress, who every now and then comes to see and feed the birds. does this thin, silent old man make his appearance, than a general twitter and scream of delight is heard amidst the trees of the Tuileries, and the birds swarm about his head, sit on his shoulders and hands, while others describe a thousand revolutions around his head. "Who is that ?" I asked of one of the group of people who stood by. "I never heard his name; he is the bird-charmer." I was almost ready to believe that he was a charmer, for he threw them a very few crumbs-a supply quite inadequate, apart from past and future favours, to produce the curious scene. I tried hard to discover the name of this man, but the Parisians are not curious about the names of their characters; they assign them descriptive names which suffice. For instance: "The man without a hat;" "The Persian;" "The bouquet-girl," and so on. The old “bird-charmer" spoke to no human being, kissed towards his hand to the birds, and quietly went his way the river,

"Deduci superbo

Non humilis mulier triumpho."

These words are applied by Horace to the great Cleopatra, whose heroic end he celebrates, even while exulting in her overthrow. We apply them to another woman of royal soul, who, capitulating with the world of her contemporaries, does not allow them the ignoble triumph of plundering the secrets of her life. They have long clamoured at its gates, long shouted at its windows in defamation and in glorification. Ready now for their admission, she lets the eager public in; but what they were most intent to find still eludes them. In the "Historie de ma Vie" are the records of her parentage, birth, and education. Here are detailed the subtile influences that aided or hindered Nature in one of her most lavish pieces of work; here are study, religion, marriage, maternity, authorship, friendship, travel, litigation; but the passionate loving woman, and whom she loved, are not here. To the world's triumph they belong not, and we | honour the decency and self-respect which consign them to oblivion. Nor shall we endeavour to lift the veil which she has thus thrown over the most intimate portion of her private life. We will not ask any Cronique Scandaleuse, of which there are plenty, to supply any hiatus in the dramatis personae of her life. We shall take her as she gives herself to us, bringing out the full significance of what she says, but not interpolating with it what other people say. With all this, we are not obliged to shut our eyes to the true significance of what she tells us, or to assume that in the account she gives us of herself there is necessarily less self-deception than self-judgment generally exhibits. If she mistakes the selfish for the heroic, exalts a gratification into a duty, and preaches to her sex as from the stand-point of a morality superior to theirs, we shall set it down as it seems to us. But, for the sake of manhood, as well as of womanhood, we would not that any mean or malignant hand should endeavour to show where she failed, and how.

Was she not to all of us, in our early years, a name of doubt, dread and enchantment? Did not all of us feel, in our young admiration for her, something of the world's great struggle between conservative discipline and revolutionary inspiration? We knew our parents would not have us read her, if they knew. We knew they were right. Yet we read her at stolen hours, with waning and still entreated light; and as we read, in a dreary wintry room, with a flickering candle warning us of late hours and confiding expectations, the atmosphere grew warm and glorious around us-a true human company, a living sympathy crept near us-the very world seemed not the same world after as before.

She had given us a real gift; no criticism could take it away. The hands might be sinful, but the box they broke contained an exceeding precious ointment.

Passing from ideal to real life, as all pass, who live on, we shook our heads over the books, sighed, and ceased to read them. Grown mothers ourselves, we quietly removed them as far as possible from the young hands about us, and would rather have deprived them of the noble French language altogether than have allowed it to bring them such lessons as Jaques and Valentine.

These memoirs begin at the earliest possible period, including the lives of her parents and grandparents. The latter were illustrious on one side and obscure on the other. She tells us that, by her paternal grandmother, she was allied to the kings of France, and, by her maternal grandfather, to the lowest of the people. The grandmother in question was the natural daughter of the famous Maréchal de Saxe, recognized and educated, but finally left with slender resources, and married to M. Dupin de Francueil, an accomplished person of good family and fortune, greatly her senior. To him she bore one son, named Maurice, after the great soldier. As might have been expected, her widowhood was early and long, for her aged partner soon dropped from her side, beloved and regretted. George tells that her grandmother was wont to insist that an old man can be more agreeable in the marital relation than a young one, and that M. Dupin de Francueil, elegant, accomplished, and devoted to her happiness, had in his life left nothing for her imagination to desire or her heart to regret.

As this lady is one of the heroines of the "Histoire de ina Vie," we cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture. She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her manners would seem to have been de haute école, and her culture was on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the deistic philosophy of the anti-revolutionary period; but, like other people of noble mind, instead of making doubt a pretext for licence, she brought up virtue to justify the latitude of her creed, that the solid results of conscience should entitle her to the free interpretation of doctrine. She was chaste, benovelent, and sincere. Her mother had been a singer of merit and celebrity, and she, the daughter, had both inherited her musical talent, and had received one of those thorough musical educations which alone make the possession of the art a pleasure and resource.

The first volume of these memoirs gives interesting notice of the friendships which surrounded Madame Dupin during her married life. These embraced various celebrities, historical

"Before I had seen Rousseau I had read the 'Nouvelle Héloïse' in one breath, and at the last pages I found myself so overcome that I wept and sobbed. My husband gently rallied me for this; but that day I could only cry from morning till evening. During this, M. de Francueil, with the address and the grace which he knew how to put into everything, ran to find Jean Jacques. I do not know how he managed it, but he carried him off-he brought him without having communicated to me his intention.

"I, unconscious of all this, was not hastening my toilet. I was with Madame d'Esparbés de Lussan, my friend, the most amiable woman in the world, and the prettiest, though she squinted a little, and was slightly deformed. M. de Francueil had come several times to see if I was ready. I did not observe any marks of haste in my husband, and did not hurry myself, never suspecting that he was there, the sublime Bear, in my parlour. He had entered, looking partly foolish and partly cross, and had seated himself in a corner, showing no other impatience than that about dinner, in order to get away very

"Finally. my toilet finished, and my eyes still red and swollen, I go to the parlour. I see a little man, ill-dressed and scowling, who rose clumsily, and chewed out some confused words. I look, and I guess who it is-I try to speak-I burst into tears. Francueil tries to put us in tune by a pleasantry, and bursts into tears. We could not say anything to each other. Rousseau pressed my hand without addressing me a single word. We tried to dine, to cut short all these sobs. But I could eat nothing. M. de Francueil could not be witty that day, and Rousseau escaped directly on leaving the table, without having said a word-displeased, perhaps, with having found a new contradiction to his claim of being the most persecuted, the most hated, and the most calumniated of men."

The simplicity of this narration justifies its quotation here, as illustrative of the taste and manners that prevailed a hundred years ago. The lively emotion provoked by the "Nouvelle Héloïse "is scarcely more foreign to our ideas and experience than the triangular fit of weeping in the parlour, and the dinner, silent through excess of feeling that followed it.

M. Dupin de Francueil lived with great but generous extravagance, and, as his widow averred, "ruined himself in the most amiable manner in the world." He died, leaving large estates in great confusion, from which his widow and young son were compelled to "accept the poverty" of seventy-five thousand livres as an

a later day, greatly reduced. Till its outbreak Madame Dupin lived in peace and affluence, though not on the grand scale of earlier daysdevoting herself chiefly to the care of her son, Maurice, in which latter task she secured the services of a young abbé, who afterwards prudently became the Citizen Deschartres, and who continued in the service of the family during the rest of a tolerably long life. This personage plays too important a part in the memoirs to be passed over without special notice. He continued to be the faithful teacher and companion of Maurice, until the exigencies of military life removed the latter from his control. He was also the man of business of Madame Dupin, and, at a later day, the preceptor of George herself, who, with childish petulance, bestowed on him the sobriquet of grand homme, in consequence, she tells us, of his omnicompétence and his air of importance. "My grandmother," she says, "had no presentiment, that, in confiding to him the education of her son, she was securing the tyrant, the saviour, and the friend of her whole remaining life." We would gladly give here in full George's portrait of her tutor; but if we should stop to sketch all the admirable photography of this work, our resumé would become a volume. We can only borrow a trait or two, and pass on to the consideration of other matters.

"He had been good-looking; but I am sure that no one, even in his best days, could have looked at him without laughing, so clearly was the word pedant written in all the lines of his face and in every movement of his person. To be complete, he should have been ignorant, gourmand, and cowardly. But, far from this, he was very learned, temperate, and madly courageous. He had all the great qualities of the soul, joined to an insufferable disposition, and a self satisfaction which amounted almost to delirium. But what devotion, what zeal, what a tender and generous soul!"

In the intervals of his necessary occupations he studied medicine and surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill. In the many subsequent years of his country life he made these accomplishments very useful to the village-folk. No stress of weather or unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick when summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as well as sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when they were bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even made missile weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words till they fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of the great army.

The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an unalarmed observer. As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could

not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general personal alienation of the aristocracy from the "Gerinan woman," as they called Marie Antoinette. She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable wrecks that marked its passage. Implicated as the depository of some papers supposed to be of a treasonable character, she was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, her son and Deschartres being officially separated from her and detained at Passy. The imprisonment lasted some months and its tedium was beguiled by the most fervent love-letters between the boy of sixteen and his mother. The sorrow of this separation, George says, metamorphosed the sickly, spoiled child into a fervent and resolute youth, whose subsequent career was full of courage and self-denial. Of the Revolution she writes:

"In my eyes, it is one of the phases of evangelical life: a tumultuous, bloody life, terrible at certain moments, full of convulsions, of delirium, and of sobbing. It is the violent contest of the principle of equality preached by Jesus, and passing, now like a radiant light, now like a burning torch, from hand to hand, to our own days, against the old pagan world, which is not destroyed, which will not be for a long time yet, in spite of the mission of Christ, and so many other divine missions, in spite of so many stakes, scaffolds and martyrs. What is there, then, to astonish us in the vertigo which seized all minds at the period of the inextricable mélée into which France precipitated herself in '93 ? When everything went by retaliation, when everyone became, by deed orintention, victim and executioner in turn, and when between the oppression endured and the oppression exercised there was no time for reflection of liberty and choice, how could passion have abstracted itself in action, or impartiality have dictated quiet judgments? Passionate souls were judged by others as passionate, and the human race cried out as in the time of the ancient Hussites-'This is a time of mourning, of zeal, and of fury.

The tone of our author concerning this and subsequent revolutions which have come within her own observation is throughout temperate, hopeful, and charitable. The noblest side of womanhood comes out in this; and, however her fiery youth might have counselled, in the pages now under consideration she appears as the apologist of humankind-the world's peace

maker.

long; after some months of detention she was allowed to rejoin her son at Passy, and the whole family-party speedily removed to Nohant, in the heart of Berry, which henceforth figures as the homestead in the pages of these volumes. But Maurice is soon obliged to adopt a profession. His mother's revenues have been considerably diminished by the political troubles. He feels in himself the power, the determination to carve out a career for himself, and gallantly enters, as a common soldier, the armies of the RepublicNapoleon Bonaparte being First Consul. Although he soon saw service, his promotion seems to have been slow and difficult. He was full of military ardour, and laborious in acquiring the science of his profession; but there were already so many candidates for every smallest distinction, and Maurice was no courtier, to help out his deserts with a little fortunate flattery. He complains in his letters that the tide has already turned, and that even in the army diplomacy fares better than real bravery. Still, he soon rose from the ranks, served with honour on the Rhine and in Italy, and became finally attached to the personnel of Murat, during the occupation of the Peninsula. His title of grand

son

of the Maréchal de Saxe was sometimes helpful, sometimes hurtful. In the eyes of his comrades it won him honour; but Napoleon, hearing his high descent urged as a claim to consideration, is said to have replied, brusquely: "I don't want any of those people." In his letters to his mother he recounts his adventures, military and amorous, with frankness, but without boasting; but his confidences soon became very partial, and before she knows it the poor mother has a dangerous rival. We will let him give his own account of the origin of this new relation.

"You know that I was in love in Milan. You guessed it, because I did not tell you of it. At times I fancied myself beloved in return, and then I saw, or fancied I saw, that I was not. I wished to divert my thoughts; I went away, desiring to think no more of it.

"This charming woman is here, and we have hardly spoken to each other. We scarcely exchanged a look. I felt a little vexation, though that is scarcely in my nature. She was proud towards me, although her heart is tender and passionate. This morning, during breakfast, we heard distant cannon. The general ordered me to mount at once, and go to see what it was. I rise, take the staircase in two bounds, and run to the stable. At the very moment of mounting my horse I turned and saw behind me this dear woman, blushing, embarrassed, and casting or me a lingering look expressive of fear,

This fatal look, as the experienced will readily conceive, did the business. The young soldier dreamed only of a love affair like twenty others which had made the pastime of his oft-changing quarters; but this "dear woman," Sophie Victoire Antoinette Delaborde, daughter of an old bird-fancier, was destined to become his wife, and mother of his daughter, Aurore Dupin,

C

whom the world knows as George Sand. His mother soon grew alarmed, as various symptoms of an enduring and carefully concealed attachment became evident to her keen observation. In the years that followed she left no means untried to break off this dangerous connection; her remonstrances were by turns tender and violent; her reasonings, no doubt, in great part just; but Maurice defended the woman of his choice from all accusations, from every annoyance, on the ground of her devoted and honourable attachment to him. After four years of continued trouble and irresolution, in which, George tells us, he had again and again made the endeavour to sacrifice Victoire to his mother's happiness, and after the birth of several children, who soon ceased to live, he wedded her by civil right. The birth of his daughter soon followed. "And thus it was," says George, "that I was born legitimate."

"My mother had on a pretty pink dress that day, and my father was playing some contredanses on his faithful Cremona (I have it yet, that old instrument by the sound of which I first saw the light). My mother left the dance and passed into her own room. As she went out very quietly, the dance continued. At the last chassez all round, my Aunt Lucy went into my mother's room, and immediately cried : "Come, come here, Maurice! You have a daughter !"

"She shall be named Aurore, for my poor mother, who is not here to bless her, but who will bless her one day," said my father, receiving me in his arms.

She was born in music and in pink," said my aunt. "She will be happy."

Not eminent, perhaps, has been the realization of this augury.

The young couple were so poor at this moment of their marriage, that a slender thread of gold was forced to serve for the nuptial ring; and it was not until some days later that they were able to expend six francs in the purchase of that indispensable ornament. The act once consummated, Maurice gave himself up to some hours of bitter suffering, made inevitable by what he considered a grave act of disobedience against the best of mothers. His conscience, however, on the whole, justified him. He had obeyed the Scripture precept, forsaking the old for the enevitable new relation, and surrounding her who was really his wife with the immunities of civil recognition.

left no

The marriage was concealed for some months from his mother, who, at a subsequent period, stone unturned to prove its nullity. The religious ceremony, which Catholicism considers as the indissoluble tie, had not yet been performed, and Madame Dupin hoped to prove some informality in the civil rite. In this, how ever, she did not succeed, and, after long resistance, and ill-concealed displeasure, she concluded by acknowledging the unwelcome alliance. It was the little Aurore herself whose unconscious hand severed the Gordian knot of the family difficulties. Introduced by a statagem

into her grandmother's presence, and seated in her lap as the child of a stranger, the family traits were suddenly recognized, and the little one (eight months old) effected a change of heart which neither lawyer uor priest could have induced. St. Childhood is fortunately always in the world, working ever these miracles of reconciliation.

George speaks with admirable candour of the inevitable relations between these two women. She does full justice to the legitimacy of the grandmother's objections to the marriage and her fears for its result, which were founded much more on moral than on social considerations. At the same time she nobly asserts her mother's claim to rehabilitation through a passionate and disinterested attachment, a faithful devotion to the duties of marriage and maternity, and a widowhood whose sorrow ended only with her life. She says, "The doctrine of redemption is the symbol of the principle of expiation and of rehabilitation;" but she adds, "Our society recognizes this principle in religious theory, but not in practice; it is too great, too beautiful for us." She says further, "There still exists a pretended aristocracy of virtue, which, proud of its privileges, does not admit that the errors of youth are susceptible of atonement. This condemnation is the more absurd because, for what is called the World, it is hypocritical. It is not only women of really irreproachable life, nor matrons truly respected, who are called upon to decide upon the merits of their misled sisters. It is not the company of the excellent of the earth who make opinion. That is all a dream. The great majority of women of the world is really a majority of lost women." "We must understand these remarks as applying to French society, in respect even of which we are not inclined to admit their truth. Yet there is a certain justice in the inference that women are often most severely condemned by those who are no better than themselves; and this insincerity of uncharity is far more to be dreaded than the over-zeal of virtuous hearts, which oftenest helps and heals where it has been obliged to wound.

At the risk of unduly multiplying quotations we will quote here what George says of her mother in this the flower of her days. At a later day the ill-regulated character suffered and made others suffer with its own discords, which education and moral training had done nothing to reconcile. The manly support, too, of the nobler nature was wanting, and the best half of her future and its possibilities was buried in the untimely grave of her husband. Here is what she was when she was at her best :

"My mother was not one of those bold intrigantes whose secret passion is to struggle against the prejudices of their time, and who think to make themselves greater by clinging, at the risk of a thousand affronts, to the false greatness of the world. She was far too proud to expose herself even to coldness. Her atti tude was so reserved that she passed for a timid