DEDICATION
To Mademoiselle Sophie Surville,
It is a true pleasure, my dear niece, to dedicate to you this book, the subject and details of which have won the approbation, so difficult to win, of a young girl to whom the world is still unknown, and who has compromised with none of the lofty principles of a saintly education. Young girls are indeed a formidable public, for they ought not to be allowed to read books less pure than the purity of their souls; they are forbidden certain reading, just as they are carefully prevented from seeing social life as it is. Must it not therefore be a source of pride to a writer to find that he has pleased you?

God grant that your affection for me has not misled you. Who can tell?
- the future; which you, I hope, will see, though not, perhaps.

Your uncle,
De Balzac.

But man's deliverances intervene Between the soul's swift speech and God's high will; That saith to tempests of the thought, "Be still!" And in life's lazaretto maketh clean The leprous sense. Ah, who can find his way Among the many altars? Who can call Out perfect peace from any ritual, Or shelter find in systems of a day? As one sees on some ancient urn, upthrown From out a tomb, records that none may read With like interpretation, and the stone Retains its graven fealty to the dead: So, on the great palimpsest men have writ Such lines o'ercrossed that none interprets it.

She leaned o'er her latticed casement,
The Flower of Wensleydale;
'Twas St Agnes Eve at midnight,
Through the mist the stars burnt pale.

In her hand she held twelve sage-leaves,
Plucked in her garden at noon;
And over them she had whispered thrice
The spell of a mystic rune.

For many had come a-wooing
The maid with the sloe-blue eyes;
Fain would she learn of St Agnes
To whom should fall the prize.

They said she must drop a sage-leaf
At each stroke of the midnight hour;
Then should the knight of her father's choice
Obey the summons of her voice,
And appear 'neath her oriel'd bowwer.