too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders homage; and to its gentle redemption, our loving, pitying hearts--the more loving, the more pitying for her story--are glad to leave her. Ave, thou long laborious! Ave, thou worker of wonders, thou embalmer of things most fleeting, most precious, so sealed in thy amber, "That Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!" Thou hast wrought many a picture of wild and guilty passion,--yet methinks thou didst always paint the mean as mean, the generous as generous. Nobler stories, too, thou hast told, and thy Consuelo is as pure as holy charity and lofty art could make her. They complain, that, in the world of thy creations, women are sublime and men weak; may not these things, then, be seen and judged for once through woman's eyes? Much harm hast thou done? Nay, that can only God know. They misquote thee, who veil a life of low intrigue with high-flown _dicta_ borrowed from thy works. Thou art not of their sort,--or, if it be indeed _thee_ they seek to imitate, "Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile." Thy faults have attracted them, not the virtues that redeem them. Shake thyself free of such, and with those who have loved much, and to whom much has been forgiven, go in peace! The shades of the Poets will greet thee as they greeted Dante and Virgil, when, thyself a shade, thou goest towards them. The heart that fainted at Francesca's sorrows will not refuse a throb to thine. For there is a gallery of great women, great with and without sin, where thou must sit, between Sappho and Cleopatra, the Magdalen thy neighbor,--nor yet removed wholly out of sight the Mother of the Great Forgiveness of God. * * * * * HAIR-CHAINS.