One of her most terrible trials was the frequent discovery of baseness in those she had trusted and admired. She passionately loved to reverence and confide; and the knowledge of the treacherous and deformed side of human nature cost her too much. To see venerable and beloved brows discrowned was an agony worse than death to her. Then the calm of her little chamber, the starry solitude of night, were guardian sanctuaries into which her soul fled. "It is strange how much I enjoy this being apart from everything.' "This has been one of my happy days, of those days that begin and end sweet as a cup of milk. To be alone with God, O happiness supreme!" "When I am seated here alone, or kneeling before my crucifix, I fancy myself Mary quietly listening to the Saviour. During the deep silence, when God alone speaks to it, my soul is happy, and, as it were, dead to all that is going on below or above." A more perfect picture of loneliness, a more convincing proof of the genius of solitude in its author, than is afforded by the following passage, can hardly be found: "My window is open. How tranquil everything is! All the little sounds from without reach me. I love the sound of the brook. The church clock is striking, and ours answering it. This sounding of the hours far away, and in the hall, assumes by night a mysterious character. I think of the Trappists who awake to pray, of the sick who count hour after hour in suffering, of the afflicted who weep, of the dead who sleep frozen in their beds." Eugenie was well aware of the moral dangers of too great and constant a withdrawal. She religiously strove to neutralize them. "I observe that I hardly make any mention of others, and that my egotism always occupies the stage." "There is a weakness in this bias of thought towards one's self and all that belongs to one. It is self-love." The complaint does her injustice. For it is the peculiar property of a suffering nature to tint the world with its grief. And she only poured out her selfburdened soul as a relief in her journal, never meant to be seen. In all associations with others she was selfforgetfully devoted to her duties, abundant in disinterested

attentions. Her morbid quality was really, not thinking too much of herself separately, but too much thinking of others in herself, and of herself in others. It was sympathy that was tyrannical, not egotism. To accuse themselves of a blamable self-love is the painful fallacy of those humble souls who are too tender, and not strong enough, nor enough detached from their neighbors. To be accused of such an excessive self-reference is the cruel wrong such souls always suffer from conceited and impatient observers.

The threefold characteristic of genius in affection is the richness, the intensity, and the tenacity of its emotions. The emotions of a meagre nature are comparatively narrow, pallid, and evanescent. Whatever once entered the heart of Eugenie de Guérin became complicated with aggrandizing associations, royal or tragic; throbbed with her blood, and stayed as a fixed part of her life. "At the foot of the hill there is a cross, where, two years ago, having accompanied him so far, we parted with our dear Maurice. For a long time the ground retained the impress of a horse's hoof where Maurice stopped to reach out his hand to me. I never pass that way without looking for that effaced mark of a farewell beside a cross.' The prints on the Cayla road were transient as strokes on the air, compared with the perdurable impressions on that soft, faithful heart. This peculiarity, joined with a retired and leisure life, has a good side and an evil side: for “ an exclusive feeling grows to immensity in solitude." In a soul of ample health and strength, it leads, by successive conquests, through an accumulation of glorious associations, to the noblest greatness and happiness. Its power is seen in that story of La Picciola, where a simple flower became the light, the comrade, the angel, the paradise, of a poor prisoner in whose cell it grew. Eugenie affectingly illustrates it when she says, "I must record my happiness of yesterday: a very sweet, pure happiness, -a kiss from a poor creature to whom I was giving alms. That kiss seemed to my heart like a kiss given by God." Under such conditions, the littlest things are more than the greatest things are in a crowding and dissipated existence.

On the other hand, this accreting and embalming quality of genius, this incrusting of experience with associations, in a drooping, timid soul, defective in elastic energy, leads to the most melancholy results; it exaggerates every evil, confirms and preserves every depressing influence. It fastens on the unfavorable aspects of things, heaps up sad experiences, emphasizes all dark omens, until society becomes odious, action penance, life a way of dolor, the earth a tomb, the rain tears, and the sun a funeral torch. How profoundly Eugenie suffered from this evil, hundreds of passages in her writings reveal, like so many wails and sobs translated into articulate speech. Thoughts of death and feelings of sorrow occupy that relative space, which, on any sound philosophy and estimate of our existence, ought to be occupied by thoughts of life and feelings of joy. “At night, when I am alone, the faces of all my dead relatives and friends come before me. I am not afraid; but all my meditations dress themselves in black, and the world seems to me dismal as a sepulchre." Her moods of spiritual exhaustion appear from the grateful approval she gave to the word of Fenelon in relation to irksome prayer, "If God wearies you, tell him that he wearies you.' She says, referring to a former period, "I got deeper and deeper among tombs: for two years I thought of nothing but death and dying." She calls "Inexorable dejection the groundwork of human life”; and adds, “To endure, and to endure one's self, is the height of wisdom." Surely, poor is the office of the angel of religion, descending and ascending between God and men, if at the last he can only waft us this message of despair. No, the highest wisdom is not, in sackcloth and ashes, to endure existence and ourselves. The highest wisdom is, instead of submitting to the will of God as its penitential victims, to conform to it as its grateful executives and usufructuaries, appreciating all the goods of life in the just gradation of their values. Instead of saying with Bossuet, "At the bottom of everything we find a blank, a nothingness," a healthy religious faith finds, at the top of everything, the bottom of something better. The misery of Eugenie lay in her ungrati

fied natural affections, whose disappointments held the germs of death against which she had not sufficient vitality to struggle into serene victory. Lack of life is the ground-tone of her grievous music, which would sweetly seduce the weak to death, but loudly warns the wise to a better way. Her betraying pen writes, "My soul lives in a coffin." Again, "I find myself alone, but half-alive, — as though I had only half a soul." And finally, with the anguished heroism of a total renunciation, so willing to perish as to be unwilling to leave a trace behind: “I am dying of a slow moral agony. Go, poor little book, into forgetfulness, with all the other things which vanish away!" Such an utterance proves the irritable feebleness of the centres of life to be so great that it is painful for them to re-act even upon the idea of posthumous remembrance. The fondled thought of extinction and oblivion is soothing then. Through its inner wounds, one may almost say, the very soul itself slowly bleeds to death.

There is a bird, the arawonda, that lives in the loneliest glens and the thickest woods of Brazil. Its notes are singularly like the distant and solemn tolling of a church-bell, as they boom on the still air, and plaintively die away. Sitting on the tops of the highest trees, in the deepest parts of the forest, it is rarely seen, though often heard. It is difficult to conceive anything of a more solitary and lonesome nature than the breaking of the profound silence of the woods by the mysterious toll of this invisible bird, the swelling strokes with their pathetic diminuendo coming from the air, and seeming to follow 'wherever you go. The tones of the character of Eugenie de Guérin are like the notes of the arawonda.

Her lot was thorny, yet not without roses. The world itself was a convent, in which she lived as a vestal, with bended knees, upraised eyes, a consecrated will, but an aching and bleeding heart. Poor, rich, unhappy, blessed maiden! we cannot bid her farewell without deep emotion and a lingering memory. Her journal is a nunnery of sad, white thoughts, with here and there one among them revealing, as the snowy robe of style is lifted, a heart of

agonizing flame. We pity her sufferings, admire her fortitude, revere her holiness, bow before her saintly faith and patience. What a thought of peace it is to think that she is now in God! There love is infinite, and repose perfect. No ungenial society can vex, no weary solitude burden, the freed inhabitants there.

COMTE.

THE character and life of Auguste Comte, author of the Positive Philosophy, affords a forcible example of the loneliness of a mighty personality, of the trials it is subjected to, of its temptations to misanthropy, and of the comparative neutralization of those temptations by sublime ideas, personal purity, and devotion. He believed himself born to introduce a new and better faith in philosophy and in religion. The burdensome superstitions which had so long darkened the minds, clogged the efforts, disturbed the souls, and afflicted the lives of men, these accumulated errors and evils he would teach the world to throw off, and, by a complete organization of the hierarchy of the sciences, proceed more rapidly to fulfil and enjoy their true destiny. Instead of wasting their energies in vain attempts to discover the unknowable ultimate causes of things, they should limit their inquiries to the grouping of facts and appearances, and to the discovery of their laws. He would instruct them how to outgrow their selfish antagonisms and rivalries, in a disinterested co-operation for the perfection of each other and the whole. They should no longer expend their devotional sentiments in the worship of a metaphysical abstraction, but should recognize, at last, with clear consciousness, the true Supreme Being, namely, the collective Humanity, made up of all the human beings who have lived, all who now live, and all who are hereafter to live. This impersonated totality of mankind they should love with all their mind, heart, soul, and strength, and worship with appropriate rites of good works, expansive sentiments, and symbolic offices.