George Sand is one of the few French writers who keep us closely and truly intimate with rural nature. She gives us the wild-flowers by their actual names,--snowdrop, primrose, columbine, iris, scabious. Nowhere has she touched her native Berry and its little-known landscape, its _campagnes ignorées_, with a lovelier charm than in _Valentine_. The winding and deep lanes running out of the high road on either side, the fresh and calm spots they take us to, "meadows of a tender green, plaintive brooks, clumps of alder and mountain ash, a whole world of suave and pastoral nature,"--how delicious it all is! The grave and silent peasant whose very dog will hardly deign to bark at you, the great white ox, "the unfailing dean of these pastures," staring solemnly at you from the thicket; the farmhouse "with its avenue of maples, and the Indre, here hardly more than a bright rivulet, stealing along through rushes and yellow iris, in the field below,"--who, I say, can forget them? And that one lane in especial, the lane where Athenais puts her arm out of the side window of the rustic carriage and gathers May from the overarching hedge,--that lane with its startled blackbirds, and humming insects, and limpid water, and swaying water-plants, and shelving gravel, and yellow wagtails hopping, half-pert, half-frightened, on the sand,--that lane with its rushes, cresses, and mint below, its honeysuckle and traveller's-joy above,--how gladly might one give all that strangely English picture in English, if the charm of Madame Sand's language did not here defy translation! Let us try something less difficult, and yet something where we may still have her in this her beloved world of "simplicity, and sky, and fields and trees, and peasant life,--peasant life looked at, by preference, on its good and sound side." _Voyez donc la simplicité, vous autres, voyez le ciel et les champs, et les arbres, et les paysans, surtout dans ce qu'ils ont de bon et de vrai._