cellent judge, "that I find in myself a dearth of expression; but I have not this abundance of yours, this productiveness of soul which streams forth, which courses along without ever failing, and always with an infinite charm." And writing to her of some composition of hers, produced after her religious scruples had for a long time kept her from the exercise of her talent; "You see, my dear Tortoise," he writes, "that your talent is no illusion, since after a period, I know not how long, of poetical inaction, - a trial to which any half-talent would have succumbed, it rears its head again more vigorous than ever. It is really heart-breaking to see you repress and bind down, with I know not what scruples, your spirit, which tends with all the force of its nature to develop itself in this direction. Others have made it a case of conscience for you to resist this impulse, and I make it one for you to follow it." And she says of herself, on one of her freer days: "It is the instinct of my life to write, as it is the instinct of the fountain to flow." The charm of her expression is not a sensuous and imaginative charm like that of Maurice, but rather an intellectual charm; it comes from the texture of the style rather than from its elements; it is not so much in the words as in the turn of the phrase, in the happy cast and flow of the sentence. Recluse as she was, she had a great correspondence every one wished to have letters from her; and no wonder.

To this strength of intelligence and talent of expression she joined a great force of character. Religion had early possessed itself of this force of character, and reinforced it in the shadow of the Cevennes, in the sharp and tonic nature of this region of southern France, which has seen the Albigensians, which has seen the Camisards,

Catholicism too is fervent and intense. Eugénie de Guérin was brought up amidst strong religious influences, and they found in her a nature on which they could lay firm hold. I have said that she was not a saint of the order of Saint François de Sales or Fénelon; perhaps she had too keen an intelligence to suffer her to be this, too forcible and impetuous a character. But I did not mean to imply the least doubt of the reality, the profoundness, of her religious life. She was penetrated by the power of religion: religion was the master-influence of her life; she derived immense consolations from religion, she earnestly strove to conform her whole nature to it; if there was an element in her which religion could not perfectly reach, perfectly transmute, she groaned over this element in her, she chid it, she made it bow. Almost every thought in her was brought into harmony with religion; and what few thoughts were not thus brought into harmony were brought into subjection.

Then she had her affection for her brother; and this, too, though perhaps there might be in it something a little over-eager, a little too absolute, a little too susceptible, was a pure, a devoted affection. It was not only passionate, it was tender. It was tender, pliant, and self-sacrificing to a degree that not in one nature out of a thousand, of natures with a mind and will like hers, - is found attainable. She thus united extraordinary power of intelligence, extraordinary force of character, and extraordinary strength of affection; and all these under the control of a deep religious feeling.

This is what makes her so remarkable, so interesting. I shall try and make her speak for herself, that she may show us the characteristic sides of her rare nature with her own inimitable touch.

It must be remembered that her journal is written for Maurice only; in her lifetime no eye but his ever saw it. "Ceci n'est pas pour le public," she writes; "c'est de l'intime, c'est de l'âme, c'est pour un." "This is not for the public; it contains my inmost thoughts, my very soul; it is for one." And Maurice, this one, was a kind of second self to her. "We see things with the same eyes; what you find beautiful, I find beautiful; God has made our souls of one piece." And this genuine confidence in her brother's sympathy gives to the entries in her journal a naturalness and simple freedom rare in such compositions. She felt that he would understand her, and be interested in all that she wrote.

One of the first pages of her journal relates an incident of the home-life of Le Cayla, the smallest detail of which Maurice liked to hear; and in relating it she brings this simple life before us. She is writing in November,

1834:

"I am furious with the gray cat. The mischievous beast has made away with a little half-frozen pigeon, which I was trying to thaw by the side of the fire. The poor little thing was just beginning to come round: I meant to tame him; he would have grown fond of me; and there is my whole scheme eaten up by a cat! This event, and all the rest of to-day's history, has passed in the kitchen. Here I take up my abode all the morning and a part of the evening, ever since I am without Mimi.* I have to superintend the cook; sometimes papa comes down and I read to him by the oven, or by the fireside, some bits out of the Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church. This book struck Pierril† with astonishment.

The familiar name of her sister Marie.

† A servant-boy at Le Cayla.

'Que de mouts aqui dédins! What a lot of words there are inside it.' This boy is a real original. One evening he asked me if the soul was immortal; then afterwards, what a philosopher was. We had got upon great questions, as you see. When I told him that a philosopher was a person who was wise and learned: 'Then, mademoiselle, you are a philosopher.' This was said with an air of simplicity and sincerity which might have made even Socrates take it as a compliment; but it made me laugh so much that my gravity as catechist was gone for that evening. A day or two ago Pierril left us, to his great sorrow: his time with us was up on Saint Brice's day. Now he goes about with his little dog, truffle-hunting. If he comes this way I shall go and ask him if he still thinks I look like a philosopher."

Her good sense and spirit made her discharge with alacrity her household tasks in this patriarchal life of Le Cayla, and treat them as the most natural thing in the world. She sometimes complains, to be sure, of burning her fingers at the kitchen fire. But when a literary friend of her brother expresses enthusiasm about her and her poetical nature: "The poetess," she says, "whom this gentleman believes me to be, is an ideal being, infinitely removed from the life which is actually mine, a life of occupations, a life of household-business, which takes up all my time. How could I make it otherwise? I am sure I do not know; and, besides, my duty is in this sort of life, and I have no wish to escape from it."

Among these occupations of the patriarchal life of the châtelaine of Le Cayla intercourse with the poor fills a prominent place :

66

To-day," she writes on the 9th of December, 1834,

6

"I have been warming myself at every fireside in the village. It is a round which Mimi and I often make, and in which I take pleasure. To-day we have been seeing sick people, and holding forth on doses and sickroom drinks. Take this, do that'; and they attend to us just as if we were the doctor. We prescribed shoes for a little thing who was amiss from having gone barefoot; to the brother, who, with a bad headache, was lying quite flat, we prescribed a pillow; the pillow did him good, but I am afraid it will hardly cure him. He is at the beginning of a bad feverish cold, and these poor people live in the filth of their hovels like animals in their stable; the bad air poisons them. When I come home to Le Cayla I seem to be in a palace."

She had books, too; not in abundance, not for the fancying them; the list of her library is small, and it is enlarged slowly and with difficulty. The Letters of Saint Theresa, which she had long wished to get, she sees in the hands of a poor servant girl, before she can procure them for herself. "What then?" is her comment: "very likely she makes a better use of them than I could." But she has the Imitation, the Spiritual Works of Bossuet and Fénelon, the Lives of the Saints, Corneille, Racine, André Chénier, and Lamartine; Madame de Staël's book on Germany, and French translations of Shakespeare's plays, Ossian, the Vicar of Wakefield, Scott's Old Mortality and Redgauntlet, and the Promessi Sposi of Manzoni. Above all, she has her own mind; her meditations in the lonely fields, on the oak-grown hillside of "The Seven Springs"; her meditations and writing in her own room, her chambrette, her délicieux chez moi, where every night, before she goes to bed, she opens the window to look out upon the sky, the balmy moonlit sky of Languedoc. This