"Look where we are; is it not sublime, and can you think of aught else than God? Sit down upon this moss, virgin of human steps, and see at your feet the desert unrolling its mighty depths. Did ever you contemplate anything more wild and yet more full of life? See what vigor in this free and vagabond vegetation; what movement in those woods which the wind bows and sways, in those great flocks of eagles hovering incessantly around the misty summits and passing in moving circles like great black rings over the sheet, white and watery, of the glacier. Do you hear the noise that rises and falls on every side? The torrents weeping and sobbing like unhappy souls; the stags moaning with voices plaintive and passionate, the breeze singing and laughing among the heather, the vultures screaming like frightened women; and those other noises, strange, mysterious, indescribable, rumbling muffled in the mountains; those colossal icebergs cracking in their very heart; those snows, sucking and drawing down the sand; those great roots of trees grappling incessantly with the entrails of the earth and toiling to heave the rock and to rive the shale; those unknown voices, those vague sighs, which the soil, always a prey to the pains of travail, here expires through her gaping loins; do you not find all this more splendid, more harmonious, than the church or the theater?" With our utmost effort to convey, through close fidelity, the feeling of George Sand's style, the delicious music of it, its sweet opulence of diction, its warmth of color, its easy spontaneity, its lubricity, its flow, we must ask our readers to imagine all twice as charming as they could possibly find it in any translation. As to the substance of what is said in the foregoing sentences? Other travelers may have been more fortunate, but the present writer is obliged to admit that he never saw "great flocks," or any flocks at all, of eagles "incessantly hovering around the summits" of the Alps. Indeed, the eagle is generally supposed to be a solitary bird, not inclined to fly in flocks. Also, he has never happened to meet with "stags" in the Alps, much less to hear them moan passionately or otherwise. "The vultures screaming," etc.? In short, he would be quite unable to verify in its details George Sand's beautiful description, which he thinks must have been written from the heart of the writer, much more than from either her eye or her ear. Successive generations of readers are not apt to be satisfied with merely subjective truth in what is offered them to read. There must be fact of some sort to correspond with statement, in order permanently to secure the future for an author. But feeling, rather than fact, at least in her earlier work, is the substance to which George Sand's magical style gave such exquisite form. Now for a specimen passage done in her later manner.