[Footnote 21: NOTE 21, PAGE 295. _My brother! and thine early lot._ See Note 19.] [Footnote 22: NOTE 22, PAGE 299. _I saw the meeting of two Gifted women._ Charlotte Bronte and Harriet Martineau.] [Footnote 23: NOTE 23, PAGE 302. _Whose too bold dying song._ See the last verses by Emily Bronte in _Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell_.] [Footnote 24: NOTE 24, PAGE 317. _Goethe, too, had been there._ See _Harzreise im Winter_, in Goethe's _Gedichte_.] [Footnote 25: NOTE 25, PAGE 325. The author of _Obermann_, Etienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the austere sincerity, of his principal work, _Obermann_, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest. Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: _Eternite, deviens mon asile!_ The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,--Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael,--are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though _Obermann_, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinising. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of _Obermann_; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now more fully bringing to light,--all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high. Besides _Obermann_ there is one other of Senancour's works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting; its title is, _Libres Meditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu_.]