Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 10

The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread freshness and joy around her. I breakfasted, read the paper, and here I am. The ladies of the _pension_ are still under the horizon. I pity them for the loss of two or three delightful hours.

Eleven o'clock.--Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my feet. In the garden children's voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz on "Hegel's Logic," and have run through a few articles in the Reviews.... The limitation of the French mind consists in the insufficiency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without changing the accent. The hospitality of French manners is not completed by a real hospitality of thought.... My nature is just the opposite. I am individual in the presence of men, objective in the presence of things.

I attach myself to the object, and absorb myself in it; I detach myself from subjects [_i.e._. persons], and hold myself on my guard against them. I feel myself different from the ma.s.s of men, and akin to the great whole of nature. My way of a.s.serting myself is in cherishing this sense of sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, and in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that is imitative and artificial inspires me with a secret repulsion, while the smallest true and spontaneous existence (plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me.

I feel myself in community of spirit with the Goethes, the Hegels, the Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as they are among themselves; while the French mathematicians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite of their high qualities, leave me cold, because there is in them no sense of the whole, the sum of things [Footnote: The following pa.s.sage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by antic.i.p.ation to this accusation, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the Journal:

"Toute nation livree a elle-meme et a son propre genie se fait une critique litteraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni a celle de l'Allemagne ni a celle de ses autres voisins--un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on--je ne le crois pas: mais plus vive, moins chargee d'erudition, moins theorique et systematique, plus confiante au sentiment immediat du gout. _Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, a la Francaise_: telle etait la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique francaise. Nous ne sommes pas _synthetiques_, comme diraient les Allemands; le mot meme n'est pas francaise. L'imagination de detail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sevigne, sont volontiers nos livres de chevet."

The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the authors and the books, "qui ont peu a peu forme comme notre rhetorique." French criticism of the old characteristic kind rests ultimately upon the minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin cla.s.sics.

Arnauld, Boileau, Fenelon, Rollin, Racine _fils_, Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand in one aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this common literary _fonds_, this "sorte de circulation courante a l'usage des gens instruits. J'avoue ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien plus forts dans la dissertation erudite, mais j'aurais un eternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude litteraire qui laissait a l'imagination tout son es.p.a.ce et a l'esprit tout son jeu; qui formait une atmosphere saine et facile ou le talent respirait et se mouvait a son gre: cette atmosphere-la, je ne la trouve plus, et je la regrette."--(_Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire_, vol. i. p. 311.)

The following _pensee_ of La Bruyere applies to the second half of Amiel's criticism of the French mind: "If you wish to travel in the Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides," etc.

"Un homme ne Chretien et Francois se trouve contraint dans la satyre; les grands sujets lui sont defendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se detourne ensuite sur de pet.i.tes choses qu'il releve par la beaute de son genie et de son style."--_Les Caracteres_, etc., "_Des Ouvrages del'Esprit_."]--because they have no _grasp_ of reality in its fullness, and therefore either cramp and limit me or awaken my distrust. The French lack that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things is revealed, they have very little sense of what is sacred, very little penetration into the mysteries of being. What they excel in is the construction of special sciences; the art of writing a book, style, courtesy, grace, literary models, perfection and urbanity; the spirit of order, the art of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of detail, power of arrangement; the desire and the gift for proselytism, the vigor necessary for practical conclusions. But if you wish to travel in the "Inferno" or the "Paradiso" you must take other guides. Their home is on the earth, in the region of the finite, the changing, the historical, and the diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism. When they undertake anything else they are doing violence to themselves.

April 24th. (_Noon_).--All around me profound peace, the silence of the mountains in spite of a full house and a neighboring village. No sound is to be heard but the murmur of the flies. There is something very striking in this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of the night. Life seems suspended just when it is most intense. These are the moments in which one hears the infinite and perceives the ineffable.

Victor Hugo, in his "Contemplations," has been carrying me from world to world, and since then his contradictions have reminded me of the convinced Christian with whom I was talking yesterday in a house near by.... The same sunlight floods both the book and nature, the doubting poet and the believing preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to be swayed by every pa.s.sing breath, and delights, stretched along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence of the whole being--how well I know you! To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing. It is my tendency, my instinct, my fault, my sin.

I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent upon external things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening to the pa.s.sage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire, and to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute. Intellectual Epicureanism is always threatening to overpower me. I can only combat it by the idea of duty; it is as the poet has said:

"Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui luttent; ce sont Ceux dont un dessein ferme emplit l'ame et le front, Ceux qui d'un haut destin gravissent l'apre cime, Ceux qui marchent pensifs, epris d'un but sublime, Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et jour, Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour!"

[Footnote: Victor Hugo, "Les Chatiments."]

_Five o'clock._--In the afternoon our little society met in general talk upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity and friendliness begins to show itself in our relations to each other. I read over again with emotion some pa.s.sages of "Jocelyn." How admirable it is!

"Il se fit de sa vie une plus male idee: Sa douleur d'un seul trait ne l'avait pas videe; Mais, adorant de Dieu le severe dessein, Il sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein, Et ne se hatant pas de la repandre toute, Sa resignation l'epancha goutte a goutte, Selon la circonstance et le besoin d'autrui, Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui."

[Footnote: Epilogue of "Jocelyn."]

The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, toward heaven, and fills you with divine emotion; which sings of love and death, of hope and sacrifice, and awakens the sense of the infinite. "Jocelyn"

always stirs in me impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to me to see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no parallel in French, for purity, except "Paul et Virginie," and I think that I prefer "Jocelyn." To be just, one ought to read them side by side.

_Six o'clock._--One more day is drawing to its close. With the exception of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have already lost their color. The evening chill succeeds the heat of the afternoon. The sense of the implacable flight of things, of the resistless pa.s.sage of the hours, seizes upon me afresh and oppresses me.

"Nature au front serein, comme vous...o...b..iez!"

In vain we cry with the poet, "O time, suspend thy flight!"... And what days, after all, would we keep and hold? Not only the happy days, but the lost days! The first have left at least a memory behind them, the others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse....

_Eleven o'clock._--A gust of wind. A few clouds in the sky. The nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the cricket and the river are still singing.

August 9, 1862.--Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to repair itself without our help. It mends its spider's webs when they have been torn; it re-establishes in us the conditions of health, and itself heals the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health once more into our organs, and regilds the dream of our imagination. But for this, experience would have hopelessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise part of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and what is most reasonable in man are those elements in him which do not reason.

Instinct, nature, a divine, an impersonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own follies; the invisible _genius_ of our life is never tired of providing material for the prodigalities of the self.

The essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore that unconscious life which we perceive no more than the outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while all the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It is our [Greek: antichoon], to speak with Pythagoras.

November 7, 1862.--How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that att.i.tude of ironical contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force. One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic types of it than myself. And at least I cannot reproach myself with having ever attempted to destroy the moral force of others; my reverence for life forbade it, and my self-distrust has taken from me even the temptation to it.

This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it flatters all the worst instincts of men--indiscipline, irreverence, selfish individualism--and it ends in social atomism. Minds inclined to mere negation are only harmless in great political organisms, which go without them and in spite of them. The multiplication of them among ourselves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for small states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society where negation rules, for life is an affirmation; and a society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable of death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven out of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, and continued without formal proof and without discussion. To act, we must believe; to believe, we must make up our minds, affirm, decide, and in reality prejudge the question. He who will only act upon a full scientific cert.i.tude is unfit for practical life. But we are made for action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us not, then, condemn prejudice so long as we have nothing but doubt to put in its place, or laugh at those whom we should be incapable of consoling! This, at least, is my point of view.

Beyond the element which is common to all men there is an element which separates them. This element may be religion, country, language, education. But all these being supposed common, there still remains something which serves as a line of demarcation--namely, the ideal. To have an ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or that--this is what digs gulfs between men, even between those who live in the same family circle, under the same roof or in the same room. You must love with the same love, think with the same thought as some one else, if you are to escape solitude.

Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.

How many times we become hypocrites simply by remaining the same outwardly and toward others, when we know that inwardly and to ourselves we are different. It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for we borrow no other personality than our own; still, it is a kind of deception. The deception humiliates us, and the humiliation is a chastis.e.m.e.nt which the mask inflicts upon the face, which our past inflicts upon our present.

Such humiliation is good for us; for it produces shame, and shame gives birth to repentance. Thus in an upright soul good springs out of evil, and it falls only to rise again.

January 8, 1863.--This evening I read through the "Cid" and "Rodogune."

My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power in it, but we have before us heroic idols rather than human beings. The element of artificiality, of strained pomposity and affectation, which is the plague of cla.s.sical tragedy, is everywhere apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords and pulleys of these majestic _colossi_ creaking and groaning. I much prefer Racine and Shakespeare; the one from the point of view of aesthetic sensation, the other from that of psychological sensation. The southern theater can never free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in the case of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, make one impatient. I can laugh with personages of tin and pasteboard: I can only weep with the living, or what resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature; it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets.

It is psychology of the first degree--elementary psychology--just as the colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so large an element of fact.i.tious grandeur, mingled with true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic development of monarchical France was to spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed round by a conventional civilization, and, strive as he may, no man wears a wig with impunity.

January 13, 1863.--To-day it has been the turn of "Polyeucte" and "La Morte de Pompee." Whatever one's objections may be, there is something grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is the dramatic _genre_ which is false. His heroes are roles rather than men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead of realizing them before us. They are always _en scene_, studied by others, or by themselves. With them glory--that is to say, the life of ceremony and of affairs, and the opinion of the public--replaces nature--becomes nature.

They never speak except _ore rotundo_, in _cothurnus_, or sometimes on stilts. And what consummate advocates they all are! The French drama is an oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing parties, on a day which is to end with the death of somebody, and where all the personages represented are in haste to speak before the hour of silence strikes.

Elsewhere, speech serves to make action intelligible; in French tragedy action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the procedure calculated to extract the finest possible speeches from the persons who are engaged in the action, and who represent different perceptions of it at different moments and from different points of view. Love and nature, duty and desire, and a dozen other moral ant.i.theses, are the limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes them fall into all the tragic att.i.tudes. What is really curious and amusing is that the people of all others the most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic fashion. But it was inevitable.

April 8, 1863.--I have been turning over the 3,500 pages of "Les Miserables," trying to understand the guiding idea of this vast composition. The fundamental idea of "Les Miserables" seems to be this.

Society engenders certain frightful evils--prost.i.tution, vagabondage, rogues, thieves, convicts, war, revolutionary clubs and barricades. She ought to impress this fact on her mind, and not treat all those who come in contact with her law as mere monsters. The task before us is to humanize law and opinion, to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished, to create a social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlightening vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of them, and by bringing to bear upon the guilty the healing influence of pardon.

At bottom is it not a Christianization of society, this extension of charity from the sinner to the condemned criminal, this application to our present life of what the church applies more readily to the other?

Struggle to restore a human soul to order and to righteousness by patience and by love, instead of crushing it by your inflexible vindictiveness, your savage justice! Such is the cry of the book. It is great and n.o.ble, but it is a little optimistic and Rousseau-like.

According to it the individual is always innocent and society always responsible, and the ideal before us for the twentieth century is a sort of democratic age of gold, a universal republic from which war, capital punishment, and pauperism will have disappeared. It is the religion and the city of progress; in a word, the Utopia of the eighteenth century revived on a great scale. There is a great deal of generosity in it, mixed with not a little fanciful extravagance. The fancifulness consists chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. The author ignores or pretends to forget the instinct of perversity, the love of evil for evil's sake, which is contained in the human heart.

The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty before the law is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself the right of dividing society according to its own standard into elect and reprobates, and thus confounds the relative with the absolute. The leading pa.s.sage is that in which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets the whole moral system of the strict Javert, half spy, half priest--of the irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer shows us social charity illuminating and transforming a harsh and unrighteous justice. Suppression of the social h.e.l.l, that is to say, of all irreparable stains, of all social outlawries for which there is neither end nor hope--it is an essentially religious idea.

The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, shown in the book are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its faults are to be found in the enormous length allowed to digressions and episodical dissertations, in the exaggeration of all the combinations and all the theses, and, finally, in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, which is very different from the style of natural eloquence or of essential truth. Effect is the misfortune of Victor Hugo, because he makes it the center of his aesthetic system; and hence exaggeration, monotony of emphasis, theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. A powerful artist, but one with whom you never forget the artist; and a dangerous model, for the master himself is already grazing the rock of burlesque, and pa.s.ses from the sublime to the repulsive, from lack of power to produce one harmonious impression of beauty. It is natural enough that he should detest Racine.

But what astonishing philological and literary power has Victor Hugo! He is master of all the dialects contained in our language, dialects of the courts of law, of the stock-exchange, of war, and of the sea, of philosophy and the convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of archaeology, of the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-a-brac of history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of soil, and subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He seems to have turned his Paris over and over, and to know it body and soul as one knows the contents of one's pocket. What a prodigious memory and what a lurid imagination! He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreams; he summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of opium or of hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; he makes of madness one of his tame animals, and bestrides, with equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the Hippogriff or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon he is of the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric acid, he lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, blinds, and bewilders his reader rather than he charms or persuades him. Strength carried to such a point as this is a fascination; without seeming to take you captive, it makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant you, but it holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic words are _immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous_. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his pa.s.sion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing mark is a kind of t.i.tanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in its magnificence.

Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in _esprit_, in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a gallicized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of south and north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul has less part in him than any other country. And yet, by a caprice of destiny, he is one of the literary geniuses of France in the nineteenth century! His resources are inexhaustible, and age seems to have no power over him. What an infinite store of words, forms, and ideas he carries about with him, and what a pile of works he has left behind him to mark his pa.s.sage! His eruptions are like those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is, he goes on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuilding a world of his own creation, and a world rather Hindoo than h.e.l.lenic.

He amazes me: and yet I prefer those men of genius who awaken in me the sense of truth, and who increase the sum of one's inner liberty. In Hugo one feels the effort of the laboring Cyclops; give me rather the sonorous bow of Apollo, and the tranquil brow of the Olympian Jove.

His type is that of the Satyr in the "Legende des Siecles," who crushes Olympus, a type midway between the ugliness of the faun and the overpowering sublimity of the great Pan.

May 23, 1863.--Dull, cloudy, misty weather; it rained in the night and yet the air is heavy. This somber reverie of earth and sky has a sacredness of its own, but it fills the spectator with a vague and stupefying _ennui_. Light brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is confused and indistinct, without form, or s.e.x, or accent, is antagonistic to beauty; for the mind's first need is light; light means order, and order means, in the first place, the distinction of the parts, in the second, their regular action. Beauty is based on reason.

August 7, 1863.--A walk after supper, a sky sparkling with stars, the Milky Way magnificent. Alas! all the same my heart is heavy. At bottom I am always brought up against an incurable distrust of myself and of life, which toward my neighbor has become indulgence, but for myself has led to a _regime_ of absolute abstention. All or nothing! This is my inborn disposition, my primitive stuff, my "old man." And yet if some one will but give me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my inner feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A child's caresses, a friend's talk, are enough to make me gay and expansive.

So then I aspire to the infinite, and yet a very little contents me; everything disturbs me and the least thing calms me. I have often surprised in my self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for happiness scarcely go beyond those of the bird: wings! sun! a nest! I persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so people think. No, it is from distaste, disgust, from shame at my own need of others, shame at confessing it, a fear of pa.s.sing into bondage if I do confess it.

September 2, 1863.--How shall I find a name for that subtle feeling which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was a reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I had a distinct sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had moved and charmed me once, and then had fallen back with time into the catacombs of oblivion. But all the rest was confused: place, occasion, and the figure itself, for I saw neither the face nor its expression.

The whole was like a fluttering veil under which the enigma--the secret of happiness--might have been hidden. And I was awake enough to be sure that it was not a dream.

In impressions like these we recognize the last trace of things which are sinking out of sight and call within us, of memories which are perishing. It is like a shimmering marsh-light falling upon some vague outline of which one scarcely knows whether it represents a pain or a pleasure--a gleam upon a grave. How strange! One might almost call such things the ghosts of the soul, reflections of past happiness, the _manes_ of our dead emotions. If, as the Talmud, I think, says, every feeling of love gives birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or spirit which yearns to complete its existence, and these glimmering phantoms, which have never taken to themselves form and reality, are still wandering in the limbo of the soul, what is there to astonish us in the strange apparitions which sometimes come to visit our pillow? At any rate, the fact remains that I was not able to force the phantom to tell me its name, nor to give any shape or distinctness to my reminiscence.

What a melancholy aspect life may wear to us when we are floating down the current of such dreamy thoughts as these! It seems like some vast nocturnal shipwreck in which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for help, while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries one by one, before we have been able, in this darkness of death, to press a hand or give the farewell kiss. Prom such a point of view destiny looks harsh, savage, and cruel, and the tragedy of life rises like a rock in the midst of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not to be serious under the weight of indefinable anxiety produced in us by such a spectacle. The surface of things may be smiling or commonplace, but the depths below are austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon eternal things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, upon the secrets of life and death, we become grave whether we will or no.

Love at its highest point--love sublime, unique, invincible--leads us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks to us directly of the infinite and of eternity. It is eminently religious; it may even become religion. When all around a man is wavering and changing, when everything is growing dark and featureless to him in the far distance of an unknown future, when the world seems but a fiction or a fairy tale, and the universe a chimera, when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in smoke, and all realities are penetrated with doubt, what is the fixed point which may still be his? The faithful heart of a woman! There he may rest his head; there he will find strength to live, strength to believe, and, if need be, strength to die in peace with a benediction on his lips. Who knows if love and its beat.i.tude, clear manifestation as it is of the universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstration of a fatherly and understanding G.o.d, just as it is the shortest road by which to reach him? Love is a faith, and one faith leads to another. And this faith is happiness, light and force. Only by it does a man enter into the series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed--of those true men who know the value of existence and who labor for the glory of G.o.d and of the truth. Till then we are but babblers and chatterers, spendthrifts of our time, our faculties and our gifts, without aim, without real joy--weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no account in the scheme of things. Perhaps it is through love that I shall find my way back to faith, to religion, to energy, to concentration. It seems to me, at least, that if I could but find my work-fellow and my destined companion, all the rest would be added unto me, as though to confound my unbelief and make me blush for my despair. Believe, then, in a fatherly Providence, and dare to love!

November 25, 1863.--Prayer is the essential weapon of all religions.

He who can no longer pray because he doubts whether there is a being to whom prayer ascends and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is cruelly solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what do you believe about it? At this moment I should find it very difficult to say. All my positive beliefs are in the crucible ready for any kind of metamorphosis. Truth above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us! But what I believe is that the highest idea we can conceive of the principle of things will be the truest, and that the truest truth is that which makes man the most wholly good, wisest, greatest, and happiest.