To this most painful loss Mad. Necker de Saussure attributes a deep and beneficial influence on her friend’s character. It inspired a melancholy which perhaps never was entirely dissipated, it raised her thoughts to a more exalted strain of meditation, and gave vigour and consistency to those reverential feelings, which before were perhaps hardly definite enough to be termed religion. At this time she composed her account of the private life of M. Necker, of which B. Constant has said, that no other of her works conveys so good a notion of the author. Shortly after she visited Italy for the first time. The grand and solemn remains of antiquity harmonized with the melancholy of her mind; and in this journey was developed a love of art, and, in a less degree, a taste for scenery, of which up to this time she seems to have been strangely deficient. The fruit of her travels appeared in ‘Corinne,’ written after her return to Coppet in 1805, and published at Paris early in 1807, which raised her to the first class of living writers. Mad. Necker de Saussure says, in the strain of high panegyric, “Il n’eut qu’une voix, qu’un cri d’admiration dans l’Europe lettrée; et ce phénomène fut partout un événement;” and Sir James Mackintosh, who read it in India, in a translation, says, “I swallow Corinne slowly, that I may taste every drop. I prolong my enjoyment, and really dread the termination.” Dictated by the same leading idea as ‘Delphine,’ but far superior in depth and truth of sentiment, as well as eloquence, and genuine poetic ardour, it was also free from the moral objections to the former novel. Each heroine, according to the lively author first quoted, is a transcript from the author herself. “‘Corinne’ is the ideal of Mad. de Stael; ‘Delphine’ is her very self in youth.” A similar idea occurred to Mackintosh,—“In the character of ‘Corinne,’ Mad. de Stael draws an imaginary self—what she is, what she had the power of being, and what she can easily imagine that she might have become. Purity, which her sentiments and principles teach her to love; talents and accomplishments, which her energetic genius might easily have acquired; uncommon scenes, and incidents fitted for her extraordinary mind; and even beauty, which her fancy contemplates so constantly, that she can scarcely suppose it to be foreign to herself, and which, in the enthusiasm of invention, she bestows on this adorned as well as improved self,—these seem to be the materials out of which she has formed ‘Corinne,’ and the mode in which she reconciled it to her knowledge of her own character.... The grand defect is the want of repose—too much, and too ingenious reflection—too uniform an ardour of feeling. The understanding is fatigued, the heart ceases to feel.”