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188 its defects. She saw Germany on the eve of a great awakening, and was not perhaps as fully conscious of this as she might have been. As Sainte Beuve happily says, she was not a poet, and it is only poets who, like birds of passage, feel a coming change of season. Germany appealed to her, however, through everything in herself that was least French; her earnestness, her vague but ardent religious tendencies, her spiritualism, her excessive admiration of intellectual pursuits. She was, therefore, exceptionally well-qualified to reveal to her own countrymen the hitherto unknown or unappreciated beauties of the German mind.

She was, on the other hand, extremely alive to the dulness of German, and especially of Viennese, society, and portrays it in a series of delightfully witty phrases. The Allemagne is indeed the wittiest of all her works, and abounds in the happiest touches.

The opinions expressed on German literature are favourable towards it, and on the whole correct. If she betrays that Schiller was personally more sympathetic to her than Goethe, she nevertheless was quick to perceive in the latter the strain of southern passion, the light, warmth, and colour, which made his intellect less national than universal.

Her chapters on Kant and German philosophy generally, are luminous if not exhaustive. She takes the moral sentiment as her standpoint, and pronounces from that on the different systems. Needless to say, she admires metaphysical speculations, and considers them as valuable in developing intellect and strengthening character.

Les Dix Années d'Exil is a charming book. Apart from its interest as a transcript of the writer's