him, everything hates him. What is this being and whence does he come?... Some have called him Prometheus, others Satan; I call him desire; I, the hopeless sibyl, the spirit of departed ages.... I, the broken lyre, the dumb instrument whose sounds would not be understood by those who inhabit the earth to-day, but in whose breast the eternal harmonies lie murmuring; I, the priestess of death, who feel that I once was Pythia, that I wept then, that I spoke then, but who cannot remember the healing word!... O truth, truth! to find thee I descended into abysses the very sight of which would make the bravest giddy with fear. But truth! thou hast not revealed thyself; I have sought thee for ten thousand years and have not found thee! For ten thousand years the only answer to my cries, the only consolation of my agony, has been the sound, audible throughout this whole accursed world, of that despairing sob of impotent desire! For ten thousand years I have shouted into infinity: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinity has answered: Desire! desire! O miserable Sibyl! O dumb Pythia! dash thy head against the rocks of thy cave and mingle thy blood, which is foaming with rage, with the foam of the sea!" In such an outburst as this, the soulful melancholy of those youthful years reaches its climax. Condensed as I have given it here--it is six times as long in the original--it is a beautiful, poetical expression of George Sand's fully developed youthful self-consciousness. At the time she wrote _Indiana_, neither her feeling of her own superiority nor her pessimism had reached this stage. That unpretending tale she composed as the sympathising spokeswoman of the victims of existing social conditions. In it she did not consciously attack any social institution--not even marriage, as the opponent of which she was at once stigmatised. She is evidently speaking the truth when (in the preface of 1842) she declares that long after writing the original preface to _Indiana_ under the influence of a remnant of respect for existing social institutions, she continued her attempt to solve the insoluble problem, to find a means of securing the happiness and dignity of the individuals oppressed by society which should be consonant with the existence of society. And she is also perfectly truthful when, in a letter to Nisard (the last in _Lettres d'un Voyageur_), she maintains that she has only attacked husbands, and not marriage as a social institution. It was in the rôle of the psychologist and story-teller, not in that of the reformer, that she at first appeared before the public. In _Indiana_, as in _Valentine_, the fervour, the poetical impulses, the enthusiastic passions and stormy protests of youth, are the proper contents of the book; there is much psychological and little personal history. Nevertheless there was in the nature of the feelings described (feelings free from any trace of viciousness, yet at variance with the decrees of society), and still