of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, its peace, its faith-art thou not the typical example of a life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its God, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, carries within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of desire, and an agony of incurable disillusion? I also am reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink of the great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infinite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by this blind passion for life, these desperate struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to complete exhaustion and taciturn despair. What is the reason of it all? Doubt doubt of one's self, of thought, of men, and of life-doubt which enervates the will and weakens all our powers, which makes us forget God and neglect prayer and duty-that restless and corrosive doubt which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with satire.

August 9, 1859. Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so. However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear-there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own unclothing; I forget still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable

shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cataleptic tranquillity which enwraps me.

I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, the kief of the Turk, the "ecstasy" of the orientals, and yet I am conscious all the time that the pleasure of it is deadly, that, like the use of opium or of hasheesh, it is a kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects to the joys of action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty.

April 11, 1865.- How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life, when we have neither the crown of completed manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body growing weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who might close our eyes and honor our name! The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find the mournful word too late ringing in our ears! "Too late, the sand is turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped - too late! Thou hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping so much the worse! Every man rewards or punishes himself. To whom or of whom wouldst thou complain?" Alas!

April 21, 1865. A morning of intoxicating beauty, fresh as the feeling of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like a bride. The poetry of youth, of innocence, and of love overflowed my soul. Even to the light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain image of that tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery the inmost thoughts of the maiden everything that I saw delighted my eyes and spoke to my imagination. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and the matin bells ringing in some distant village harmonized marvelously with the hymn of nature. Pray," they said, "and love! Adore a fatherly and beneficent God." They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in them and in the landscape a childlike joyousness, a naïve gratitude, a radiant, heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred, simple-hearted ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.

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I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beatitude. One understands the delights of a bird's existence,

-that emancipation from all encumbering weight, that luminous and empyrean life, floating in blue space, and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the whole being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty. Enough; to your work, dreamer!

May 30, 1865. All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is a moral reality.

Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the first attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It is all very well to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is determined to see nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst.

To injure others, while at the same time knowingly injuring one's self, is a step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity. Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast, he must seem to the angels a madman — a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this property that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown

power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace. which is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere reëstablished. Love will be more potent than hatred; God will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan.

June 26, 1865. One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical résumé of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even to one's self-confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the vain hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart, like water dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern, all these mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid.

For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They are the symbol of the powerlessness of the soul to restrain its emotion and to remain mistress of itself. Speech implies analysis; when we are overcome by sensation or by feeling, analysis ceases, and with it speech and liberty. Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language of actionpantomime. Any oppressive weight of thought carries us back. to a stage anterior to humanity, to a gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swooning and collapse; that is to say, incapable of bearing the excessive strain of sensation as men, we fall back

successively to the stage of mere animate being, and then to that of the vegetable. Dante swoons at every turn in his journey through hell, and nothing paints better the violence of his emotions and the ardor of his piety.

. . And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself and is silent. To speak is to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and localize life in a single point; they touch only the circumference of being; they analyze, they treat one thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and chill it in doing so. The heart would fain brood over its feeling, cherishing and protecting it. Its happiness is silent and meditative; it listens to its own beating and feeds religiously upon itself.

THE ATTIC PHILOSOPHER.

BY ÉMILE SOUVESTRE.

[ÉMILE SOUVESTRE: A French novelist and playwright; born at Morlaix, April 15, 1806; died at Paris, July 5, 1854. He became a journalist, and first won recognition by his sketches of Brittany, "Les Derniers Bretons" and "Foyer Breton." "Un Philosophe sous les Toits" was crowned by the Academy in 1851. He also wrote "Causeries Historiques et Littéraires" (2 vols., 1854), and many plays which did not achieve any great degree of popularity.]

WHAT POWER COSTS AND FAME BRINGS.

12th, seven o'clock P.M. On coming home this evening, I saw, standing at the door of a house, an old man, whose pose and features reminded me of my father. There was the same beautiful smile, the same deep and eager eye, the same noble bearing of the head, and the same careless attitude.

This sight has carried my thought backward. I set myself to go over the first years of my life; to recall the conversations of that guide whom God in His mercy had given me, and whom in His severity He had too soon taken away.

When my father spoke, it was not only to bring our two minds in touch by an exchange of ideas, his words always contained instruction.

Not that he endeavored to make me feel it so my father feared everything that had the appearance of a lesson. He used to say that virtue could make herself devoted friends,