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he work now performed and that awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble. She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her sentences were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him; there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of initiation,--but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the author's nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman "thus intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the most rare," she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception. But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,--or Clotilda at her books, "looking very much like an old picture of a young person sitting there,"--or the charming one of Laura's pas, which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, "She quite swam, and turned her eyes upward,"--or, b