In no other of her works is she so eloquent, in none of the later ones do her periods flow in such long, lyrically rhetorical waves. Nowhere better than here can we study her personal style, as distinguished from the dialogue of her novels. Sonority is its most marked feature. It rolls onward in long, full rhythms, regular in its fall and rise, melodious in joy, harmonious even in despair. The perfect balance of George Sand's nature is mirrored in the perfect balance of her sentences--never a shriek, a start, or a jar; a sweeping, broad-winged flight--never a leap, nor a blow, nor a fall. The style is deficient in melody, but abounds in rich harmonies; it lacks colour, but has all the beauty that play of line can impart. She never produces her effect by an unusual and audacious combination of words, seldom or never by a fantastic simile. And there is just as little strong or glaring colour in her pictures as there is jarring sound in her language. She is romantic in her enthusiasms, in the way in which she yields unresistingly to feelings which defy rules and regulations; but she is severely classical in the regularity of her periods, in the inherent beauty of her form, and the sobriety of her colouring.[3] The letters from Venice, and still more those written after her return to France, tell the understanding reader how humiliated George Sand felt by the loss of De Musset's friendship, how sadly she missed it, and what a fictitious account of the whole episode it was which she gave to the public some twenty years later in _Elle et Lui_. There is little doubt that there were times when she felt utterly overwhelmed with longing, shame, and grief. In a letter to Rollinat written in January 1835, there is a significant and, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed passage, which, beautiful in itself, also contains a confession: