Madame de Staël was always obliged to generalize, that being a law of her intelligence, and this disposition is accentuated in the _Allemagne_, through her desire to establish such contrasts between Germany and France, as would inspire the latter with a sense of its defects. She saw Germany on the eve of a great awakening, and was not perhaps as fully conscious of this as she might have been. As Saint Beuve happily says, she was not a poet, and it is only poets who, like birds of passage, feel a coming change of season. Germany appealed to her, however, through everything in herself that was least French; her earnestness, her vague but ardent religious tendencies, her spiritualism, her excessive admiration of intellectual pursuits. She was, therefore, exceptionally well-qualified to reveal to her own countrymen the hitherto unknown or unappreciated beauties of the German mind. She was, on the other hand, extremely alive to the dullness of German, and especially of Viennese, society, and portrays it in a series of delightfully witty phrases. The _Allemagne_ is indeed the wittiest of all her works, and abounds in the happiest touches. The opinions expressed on German literature are favorable towards it, and on the whole correct. If she betrays that Schiller was personally more sympathetic to her than Goethe, she nevertheless was quick to perceive in the latter the strain of southern passion, the light, warmth and color, which made his intellect less national than universal. Her chapters on Kant and German philosophy generally, are luminous if not exhaustive. She takes the moral sentiment as her standpoint, and pronounces from that on the different systems. Needless to say, she admires metaphysical speculations, and considers them as valuable in developing intellect and strengthening character. _Les Dix Années d’Exil_ is a charming book. Apart from its interest as a transcript of the writer’s impressions during her exile at Coppet and subsequent flight across Europe, it contains brilliant pictures of different lands, and especially Russia. One is really amazed to note how much she grasped of the national characteristics during her brief sojourn in that country. The worst reproach that can be addressed to her description is that, as usual, it is rather too favorable. Her anxiety to prove that no country could flourish, during a reign such as Napoleon’s, made her disposed to see through rose-colored spectacles the Governments which found force to resist him.