respect protecting itself against the conventionalities and scorns of those who despised what he revered and revered what he despised. His interior life, with the relations of thoughts and things, was intensely tender and true, however sorely ajar he may have been with persons and with the ideas of persons. If he was sour, it was on a store of sweetness; if sad, on a fund of gladness. While we walked in procession up to the church, though the bell tolled the forty-four years he had numbered, we could not deem that he was dead whose ideas and sentiments were so vivid in our souls. As the fading image of pathetic clay lay before us, strewn with wild flowers and forest sprigs, thoughts of its former occupant seemed blent with all the local landscapes. We still recall with emotion the tributary words so fitly spoken by friendly and illustrious lips. The hands of friends reverently lowered the body of the lonely poet into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features and so attuned to their moods. And now that it is too late for any further boon amidst his darling haunts below, There will yet his mother yield MAURICE DE GUÉRIN. MAURICE DE GUERIN, born in Southern France, in 1810, of an ancient and noble but impoverished family, was graced with such personal gifts as to attract extreme interest from his associates, and endowed with literary talents which have gained him an enviable fame by the few exquisite works bequeathed when he died, at the early age of twenty-nine. His sister Eugénie, and his friends, Trebutien, La Morvonnais, Marzan, Sainte-Beuve, George Sand, and others, have secured the publication of his brief compositions, drawn attention to their singular charm, and paid tributes to his memory not soon to be forgotten. Nothing of the kind can be more interesting than the peculiarities of constitution and experience which made the character of this gifted young man so shy and lonely, his career so unhappy, his death so pathetic, the image of him left behind so strangely attractive and sad. At twelve, the tender boy, "poor bird exiled from his native turrets," went to Toulouse to study at a seminary there; afterwards to the College Stanislas in Paris. At a later period, he returned home, and tarried in the midst of domestic love and the stillest seclusion. But, inwardly wounded, unhappy, uncertain, he was drawn in heart and fancy alternately to a brilliant career in the world, and to the mystic life of a religious retreat. The following striking passage is a transcript from his own soul; "Which is the true God? The God of cities, or the God of deserts? To which to go? Long-cherished tastes, impulses of the heart, accidents of life, decide the choice. The man of cities laughs at the strange dreams of the eremites: these, on the other hand, exult at their separation, at finding themselves, like the islands of the great ocean, far from continents, and bathed by unknown waves. The most to be pitied are those who, flung between these two, stretch their arms first to the one, then to the other." The last sentence describes his own state for a long time. He at length came under the influence of the renowned Lamennais, whose disciples he joined at La Chênaie. Amidst the wild scenery of Brittany, with a group of enthusiastic young men of genius and devotion, under the eye of the fascinating master whose.combination of Catholicism and Democracy, whose electric words, whose conflict and subsequent rupture with the papacy, caused such a sensation in that day; whose soul was so torn, and whose end so tragic, Maurice remained for nine months. But he was made for a poet rather than for a devotee. The attraction of nature and letters overpowered that of faith and the cloister. And one day, with deep emotion, he said farewell to his venerated master, parted from his beloved comrades, and heard the gates of the little paradise of La Chênaie shut behind him. He paused on his way to Paris at the romantic home of his friend La Morvonnais. "Behold how good Providence is to me! For fear the sudden transition from the softly-tempered air of religious solitude to the torrid zone of the world would try my soul too severely, it has drawn me from my sanctuary into a house raised on the border of the two regions, where, without being in solitude, one still does not belong to the world; a house whose windows open, on the one side upon the plain covered with the tumult of men, on the other upon the desert where the servants of God are singing; there upon the ocean, here upon the woods." He went to the capital in which the ambition, intellect, and pleasure of the world are concentrated. His religious interest died down. He drank the cup which the senses are offered in that wondrous bewilderment of prizes, perils, delights, agonies, the focus of the luxuries and excitements of the earth. A hard struggle with obscurity and poverty, interspersed with ominous illness, with a few visits to dear Cayla, followed by his happy marriage, crowned in less than a year by his death, and the bitter-sweet story of his outer life was done. Guérin was one of those natures gifted with vast powers of intuition and sentiment, but small powers of organization and execution, who exceedingly interest others, but are unable to be sufficiently interested themselves, and therefore early become the victims of depression, weariness, sickness, and death. His nervous system was of that ethereal and ravenous temperament, which, not able to appropriate accordant and adequate nutriment from without, preys upon itself. Preternaturally sensitive to ideal hurts and helps, he nursed those delicious sadnesses which devour vitality while they feed sentiment. He felt his thoughts and emotions as though they were material pictures, solid objects passing through his imagination all alive, conscious atoms swimming in the bosom of the soul. Consequently, matters of the inner life which would be to others only trifling impressions were colossal portents to him, -electrifying blisses or overwhelming agonies. He seemed to possess marvel 66 lous modes of intellection and emotion of his own, sweeter and vaguer than are known by common mortals; an intoxication of delicious monotony and languor; a half sleep, empty of thought, yet full of enchanting dreams of beautiful things." Too rich to be insensible to the wealth and loveliness of the universe, too poor to be able to grasp and fix the divine shapes in solid forms of art, he was torn between aspiration and weakness, will and want. Few souls ever turned so lucid a mirror to the phenomena of nature, or were so intensely conscious of what occurred within them, as his. Musing on a fearful tempest, he said, “Strange and admirable, these moments of sublime agitation joined with profound reverie, wherein the soul and nature, arrayed in all their grandeur, lift themselves face to face." At times, he said, he could hear at the bottom of his being faint murmurs marking the return of life from afar. "These rustling rumors are produced by my thoughts, which, rising out of their dolorous torpor, make a light agitation of timid joy, and begin conversations full of memories and hopes." What a delicate revelation of his poetic softness of soul in this sentiment, "Happy who sits on the top of the mountain, and sees the lion bound and roar across the plain, with no traveller or gazelle passing near!" "That He was fascinating both by demonstrativeness and by reticence, his frankness and his mystery. His father said that "in childhood his soul was often seen on his lips ready to fly." His writings show a spiritual unveiling, wonderful in quality and quantity. Yet he says, which every man of a certain choice nature guards with the greatest vigilance, is the secret of his soul and of the closest habits of his thoughts. I love this god Harpocrates, his finger on his lip." And Sainte-Beuve says, "He loved only on the surface, and before the first curtain of his soul: the depth, something behind, remained mysterious and reserved." He was unlike those about him, and the strange difference drew them, while it estranged him. The superlative tenderness of his spirit was a weakness that disqualified him for happiness among the coarse, noisy natures of the commonalty, and made him in all things shrink from the vulgar, and yearn to the select; detest the commonplace, and adore the sublime. He said the reading of Chateaubriand's René dissolved his soul like a rain-storm. He complained greatly of the loss in society of all simple and primitive tastes, the sophistication and destruction of the naïve virgin sentiments of the soul. Feeling himself solitary, excommunicated, diffident, and embarrassed, he often regarded the intrepidity and effrontery of more audacious though inferior men, his associates, with admiration, and almost envy they, on the other hand, recognized his rare gifts, plied him with compliments, urged him forward, rallied him with jests on his shrinking self-depreciation and fear. He wrote in his journal, "To me it is insupportable to appear other before men than one is before God. My severest punishment at this instant is the extravagant estimate formed of me by some beautiful souls." Again: "I lose half of my soul in losing solitude. I enter the world with a secret horror." Going into Paris, "trembling and shivering as a scared deer," distrustful of himself, and afraid of men, he prays, "My God! close my eyes; keep me from the sight of the multitude, the view of whom raises in me thoughts so bitter, so discouraging. Let me traverse the crowd, deaf to the noise, inaccessible to the impressions which crush me as I pass through it. Place before my eyes, instead, a vision of something I love, a field, a vale, a moor, Le Cayla, Le Val, an image of some object of nature. The isolation and unhappiness of this poor youth were unspeakably piteous. At eighteen, he speaks of being "possessed by an inveterate melancholy, and fed on a sad diet of regrets and miseries." It is obvious that he was never a misanthrope or an indifferentist, but painfully concerned about his fellow-men. He had an absorbing ambition in combination with a haunting sense of a lack of the organic strength and perseverance necessary to sustain the tremendous labors which alone could ever purchase the proud attainments he coveted. This ambition, and this conviction of defect, kept him making comparisons, personal, artistic, critical; and constantly |