UC-NRLF 
 
 B M Dbl 73T 
 
 OURNAL 
 
 Maurice de Guerin 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 FROM THt LIBRARY OV 
 
 BENJAMIN PARKE AVERY. 
 
 Gift of Mrs. avert. 
 
 Aug-ust, i8q6. y 
 
 Accessions No. In ^'J^^n Class No. * 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
ll^(f. ClM^ 
 
^r 
 
IN PREPARATION. 
 
 THE 
 LETTERS AND LTTERARYREMAINS 
 
 OF 
 
 f MAURICE DE GUERIN. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 E. THORNTON FISHER. 
 
 Uniform with this Volume. 
 
THE JOURNAL 
 
 OF 
 
 Maurice de Guerin 
 
 WITH AN ESS A Y BY MA TTHE W ARNOLD, 
 AND A MEMOIR BY SAINTE-BEUVE 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 G. S. vT^R-BlB^U T I E N 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 EDWARD THORNTON FISHER 
 
 Professor of English Language and Literature 
 at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute 
 
 m 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 LEYPOLDT & HOLT 
 
 1867 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 186G, by 
 
 LEY FOLD T & HOLT, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States 
 
 for the Southern District of New York. 
 
 JOHN K. TROW & CO., 
 
 PRINTERS, STEREOTYPERS, ff ELECTROTYPEES, 
 
 50 GUEENE STREET, N.Y. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 I. Essay on the Life and Genius of Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 by Matthew Arnold, . . . . .1 
 
 II. Preface to the Original Edition, by G. S. Trebutien, 13 
 
 III. Memoir of Maurice de Guerin, by Sainte-Beuve, . 19 
 
 IV. Journal of Maurice de Guerin, . , . '57 
 
ESSAY 
 
 ON 
 
 THE LIFE AND GENIUS 
 
 OF 
 
 MAURICE DE GUERIN 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 WILL not presume to say that I now know 
 the French language well; but at a time 
 when I knew it even less well than at pres- 
 ent, — some fifteen years ago, — I remember 
 pestering those about me with this sentence, the rhythm 
 of which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with 
 the strangest pronunciation possible, I kept perpetually 
 declaiming: "Les dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part 
 les temoignages de la descendance des choses ; mais au 
 bord de quel Ocean ont ils roule la pierre qui les couvre, 
 6 Macaree ! " 
 
 These words come from a short composition called 
 
2 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 the Centaur, of which the author, Georges-Maurice de 
 Guerin, died in the year 1839, at the age of twenty-eight, 
 without having pubhshed anything. In 1840, Madame 
 Sand brought out the Centaur in the Revue des Deux 
 Moitdes, with a short notice of its author, and a few ex- 
 tracts from his letters. A year or two afterwards she 
 reprinted these at the end of a volume of her novels ; 
 and there it was that I fell in with them. I was so much 
 struck with the Centaur that I waited anxiously to hear 
 something more of its author, and of what he had left ; 
 but it was not till the other day — twenty years after the 
 first publication of the Centaur in the Revue des Deux 
 Mojtdes — that my anxiety was satisfied. At the end of 
 i860 appeared two volumes with the title, Maurice de 
 Guerin, Reliquice, containing the Ce7ttaur, several poems 
 of Guerin, his journals, and a number of his letters, col- 
 lected and edited by a devoted friend, M. Trebutien, 
 and preceded by a notice of Guerin by the first of living 
 critics, M. Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 — -The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; 
 by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black 
 and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, 
 but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in 
 us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, 
 and of our relations with them. When this sense is 
 awakened in us, as to objects without us, we feel our- 
 selves to be in contact with the essential nature of those 
 objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by 
 them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony 
 with them ; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no 
 other can. Poetry, indeed, interprets in another way 
 besides this ; but one of its two ways of interpreting, of 
 .exercising its highest power, is by awakening this sense 
 
Essayy by Matthew Arnold, 3 
 
 in us. I will not now inquire whether this sense is 
 illusive, whether it can be proved not to be illusive, 
 whether it does absolutely make us possess the real 
 nature of things ; all I say is, that poetry can awaken 
 it in us, and that to awaken it is one of the highest 
 powers of poetry. The interpretations of science do 
 not give us this intimate sense of objects as the inter- 
 pretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited 
 faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus, 
 or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of 
 animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for 
 us, who makes us participate in their life j it is Shake- 
 speare, with his 
 
 " daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty " ; 
 
 it is Wordsworth, with his 
 
 "voice .... heard 
 In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird, 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides " ; 
 
 it is Keats, with his 
 
 " moving waters at their priestlike task 
 Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores " ; 
 
 it is Chateaubriand, with his ^^ chne i?idetermink des fo- 
 rets " ; it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree : 
 " Cette ecorce blanche^ lisse et crevassee ; cette tige agreste; 
 ces branches qui sHncUnent vers la terre ; la mobiliti des 
 feuillesj et tout cet abandon, simplicity de la nature, attitude 
 des dtserts.^^ 
 
 Eminent manifestations of this magical power of 
 
4 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 poetry are very rare and very precious ; the composi- 
 tions of Guerin manifest it, I think, in singular eminence. 
 Not his poems, strictly so called — his verse, — so much 
 as his prose ; his poems in general take for their vehicle 
 that favorite metre of French poetry, the Alexandrine j 
 and, in my judgment, I confess they have thus, as com- 
 pared with his prose, a great disadvantage to start with. 
 In prose, the character of the vehicle for the composer's 
 thoughts is not determined beforehand ; every composer 
 has to make his own vehicle ; and who has ever done 
 this more admirably than the great prose-writers of 
 France, — Pascal, Bossuet, F^nelon, Voltaire? But in 
 verse the composer has (with comparatively narrow 
 liberty of modification) to accept his vehicle ready-made ; 
 it is therefore of vital importance to him that he should 
 find at his disposal a vehicle adequate to convey the 
 highest matters of poetry. We may even get a decisive 
 test of the poetical power of a language and nation by 
 ascertaining how far the principal poetical vehicle which 
 they have employed, how far (in plainer words) the es- 
 tablished national metre for high poetry, is adequate or 
 inadequate. It seems to me that the established metre 
 of this kind in France — the Alexandrine — is inadequate ; 
 that as a vehicle for high poetry it is greatly inferior to 
 the hexameter or to the iambics of Greece, (for example,) 
 or to the blank verse of England. Therefore the man 
 of genius who uses it is at a disadvantage as compared 
 with the man of genius who has for conveying his thouglits 
 a more adequate vehicle, metrical or not. Racine is at 
 a disadvantage as compared with Sophocles or Shake- 
 speare, and he is likewise at a disadvantage as compared 
 with Bossuet. The same may be said of our own poets 
 of the eighteenth century, a century which gave them as 
 
Essay, by Matthew Arnold, 5 
 
 the main vehicle for their high poetry a metre inadequate 
 (as much as the French Alexandrine, and nearly in the 
 same way) for this poetry, — the ten-syllable couplet. It 
 is worth remarking, that the English poet of the eighteenth 
 century v/hose compositions wear best and give one the 
 most entire satisfaction, — Gray, — does not use that 
 couplet at all ; this abstinence, however, limits Gray's 
 productions to a few short compositions, and (exquisite 
 as these are) he is a poetical nature repressed and with- 
 out free issue. For English poetical production on a 
 great scale, for an English poet deploying all the forces 
 of his genius, the ten-syllable couplet was, in the eighteenth 
 century, the established, one may almost say the inevi- 
 table, channel. Now this couplet, admirable (as Chaucer 
 uses it) for story-telling not of the epic pitch, and often 
 admirable for a few lines even in poetry of a very high 
 pitch, is for continuous use in poetry of this latter 
 kind inadequate. Pope, in his Essay o?t Man, is thus 
 at a disadvantage compared with Lucretius in his poem 
 on Nature : Lucretius has an adequate vehicle, Pope has 
 not. Nay, though Pope's genius for didactic poetry was 
 not less than that of Horace, while his satirical power 
 was certainly greater, still one's taste receives, I cannot 
 but think, a certain satisfaction when one reads the 
 Epistles and Satires of Horace, which it fails to receive 
 when one reads the Satires and Epistles of Pope. Of 
 such avail is the superior adequacy of the vehicle used 
 to compensate even an inferiority of genius in the user ! 
 In the same way Pope is at a disadvantage as compared 
 with Addison : the best of Addison's composition (the 
 " Coverley Papers " in the Spectator, for instance) wears 
 better than the best of Pope's, because Addison has in 
 his prose an intrinsically better vehicle for his genius 
 
6 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 than Pope in his couplet. But Bacon has no such ad- 
 vantage over Shakespeare; nor has Milton, writing 
 prose (for no contemporary English prose-writer must 
 be matched with Milton except Milton himself), any- 
 such advantage over Milton writing verse : indeed, the 
 advantage here is all the other way. 
 
 It is in the prose remains of Guerin, — his journals, 
 his letters, and the striking composition which I have 
 already mentioned, the Centaur, — that his extraordinary 
 gift manifests itself. He has a truly interpretative 
 faculty; the most profound and delicate sense of the 
 life of Nature, and the most exquisite felicity in finding 
 expressions to render that sense. To all who love poetry, 
 Guerin deserves to be something more than a name ; and 
 I shall try, in spite of the impossibility of doing justice 
 to such a master of expression by translations, to make 
 my English readers see for themselves how gifted an 
 organization his was, and how few artists have received 
 from Nature a more magical faculty of interpreting her.* 
 
 In few natures, however, is there really such essential 
 consistency as in Guerin's. He says of himself, in the 
 very beginning of his journal : " I owe everything to 
 poetry, for there is no other name to give to the sum 
 total of my thoughts ; I owe to it whatever I now have 
 pure, lofty, and solid in my soul ; I owe to it all my con- 
 solations in the past; I shall probably owe to it my 
 future." Poetry, the poetical instinct, was indeed the 
 
 * Here and elsewhere, where breaks are marked by asterisks, 
 the American editor has taken the liberty of omitting from Professor 
 Arnold's essay passages which would be superfluous in a volume 
 containing De Guerin's Journal. 
 
Essay, by Matthew Arnold, 7 
 
 basis of his nature; but to say so thus absolutely is not 
 quite enough. One aspect of poetry fascinated Gu^rin's 
 imagination and held it prisoner. Poetry is the inter- 
 pretress of the natural world, and she is the interpretress 
 of the moral world ; it was as the interpretress of the 
 natural world that she had Guerin for her mouthpiece. 
 To make magically near and real the life of Nature, and 
 man's life only so far as it is a part of that Nature, was 
 his faculty ; a faculty of naturalistic, not of moral inter- 
 pretation. This faculty always has for its basis a pecu- 
 liar temperament, an extraordinary delicacy of organ- 
 ization and susceptibility to impressions ; in exercising 
 it the poet is in a great degree passive (Wordsworth thus 
 speaks of a wise passiveness) ; he aspires to be a sort of 
 human ^olian-harp, catching and rendering every rustle 
 of Nature. To assist at the evolution of the whole life 
 of the world is his craving, and intimately to feel it all : 
 
 "the glow, the thrill of life, 
 Where, where do these abound ? " 
 
 is what he asks : he resists being riveted and held station- 
 ary by any single impression, but would be borne on for- 
 ever down an enchanted stream. He goes into religion 
 and out of religion, into society and out of society, not 
 from the motives which impel men in general, but to feel 
 what it is all like ; he is thus hardly a moral agent, and, 
 like the passive and ineffectual Uranus of Keats's poem, 
 
 he may say : 
 
 " I am but a voice ; 
 My life is but the life of winds and tides ; 
 No more than winds and tides can I avail." 
 
 He hovers over the tumult of life, but does not really put 
 his hand to it. 
 
8 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 No one has expressed the aspirations of this tempera- 
 ment better than Gu6rin himself. 
 
 Assuredly it is not in this temperament that the active 
 virtues have their rise. On the contrary, this tempera- 
 ment, considered in itself alone, indisposes for the dis- 
 charge of them. Something morbid and excessive, as 
 manifested in Guerin, it undoubtedly has. In him, as in 
 Keats, and as in another youth of genius, whose name, 
 but the other day unheard of. Lord Houghton has so 
 gracefully written in the history of English poetry, — 
 David Gray, — the temperament, the talent itself, is 
 deeply influenced by their mysterious malady ; the tem- 
 perament is devouriitg; it uses vital power too hard and 
 too fast, paying the penalty in long hours of unutterable 
 exhaustion and in premature death. The intensity of 
 Guerin's depression is described to us by Guerin himself 
 with the same incomparable touch with which he de- 
 scribes happier feelings ; far oftener than any pleasur- 
 able sense of his gift he has " the sense profound, near, 
 immense, of my misery, of my inward poverty." And 
 again : " My inward misery gains upon me ; I no longer 
 dare look within." And on another day of gloom he 
 does look within, and here is the terrible analysis : 
 
 " Craving, unquiet, seeing only by glimpses, my spirit 
 is stricken by all those ills which are the sure fruit of a 
 youth doomed never to ripen into manhood. I grow old 
 and wear myself out in the most futile mental strainings, 
 and make no progress. My head seems dying, and when 
 the wind blows I fancy I feel it, as if I were a tree, blow- 
 ing through a number of withered branches in my top. 
 Study is intolerable to me, or rather it is quite out of my 
 
Essay^ by Matthew Arnold, 9 
 
 power. Mental work brings on, not drowsiness, but an 
 irritable and nervous disgust which drives me out, I know 
 not where, into the streets and public places. The Spring, 
 whose delights used to come every year stealthily and 
 mysteriously to charm me in my retreat, crushes me this 
 year under a weight of sudden hotness. I should be glad 
 of any event which delivered me from the situation in 
 which I am. If I were free I would embark for some 
 distant country where I could begin life anew." 
 
 Such is this temperament in the frequent hours when 
 the sense of its own weakness and isolation crushes it to 
 the ground. Certainly it was not for Guerin's happiness, 
 or for Keats's, as men count happiness, to be as they 
 were. Still the very excess and predominance of their 
 temperament has given to the fruits of their genius an 
 unique brilliancy and flavor. I have said that poetry 
 interprets in two ways ; it interprets by expressing with 
 magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the 
 outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with in- 
 spired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world 
 of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, 
 poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in 
 it, and by having moral profundity. In both ways it 
 illuminates man : it gives him a satisfying sense of real- 
 ity j it reconciles him with himself and the universe. 
 Thus ^SChylus's " Spdo-avn TraS-CLV " and his " avrjpiS^jXOV 
 yeXacr/xa" are alike interpretative. Shakespeare inter- 
 prets both when he says, 
 
 " Full many a glorious morning have I seen, 
 Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye " j 
 
 and when he says, 
 
 " There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hev/ them as we will." 
 
lo Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 These great poets unite in themselves the faculty of both 
 kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral. 
 But it is observable that in the poets who unite both 
 kinds, the latter (the moral) usually ends by making 
 itself the master. In Shakespeare the two kinds seem 
 wonderfully to balance one another ; but even in him the 
 balance leans j his expression tends to become too little 
 sensuous and simple, too much intellectualized. The 
 same thing may be yet more strongly affirmed of Lucre- 
 tius and of Wordsworth. In Shelley there is not a bal- 
 ance of the two gifts, nor even a co-existence of them, 
 but there is a passionate straining after them both, and 
 this is what makes Shelley, as a man, so interesting. I 
 will not now inquire how much Shelley achieves as a 
 I poet, but whatever he achieves, he in general fails to 
 achieve natural magic in his expression ; in Mr. Pal- 
 grave's charming Treasury may be seen a gallery of his 
 failures.* But in Keats and Guerin, in whom the faculty 
 of naturalistic interpretation is overpoweringly predomi- 
 nant, the natural magic is perfect ; when they speak of the 
 world they speak like Adam naming by divine inspira- 
 tion the creatures ; their expression corresponds with the 
 * thing's essential reality. Even between Keats and 
 Guerin, however, there is a distinction to be drawn. 
 Keats has, above all, a sense of what is pleasurable and 
 
 * Compare, for example, his " Lines Written in the Euganean 
 Hills," with Keats's " Ode to Autumn" {Golden Treasury, pp. 256, 
 284). The latter piece renders Nature ; the former tries to render 
 her. I will not deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in 
 his rhythm ; what I deny is, that he has it in his language. It 
 always seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley's genius was 
 the sphere of music, not of poetry ; the medium of sounds he can 
 master, but to master the more difficult medium of words he has 
 neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough. 
 
Essay ^ by Matthew Arnold, ii 
 
 open in the life of Nature ; for him she is the Alma 
 Pare7is : his expression has, therefore, more than 
 Guerin's, something genial, outward, and sensuous. 
 Gu^rin has above all a sense of what there is adorable 
 and secret in the life of Nature ; for him she is the 
 Magna Parens : his expression has, therefore, more than 
 Keats's, something mystic, inward, and profound. 
 
 So he lived like a man possessed ; with his eye not 
 on his own career, not on the public, not on fame, but on 
 the Isis whose veil he had uplifted. He published noth- 
 ing : " There is more power and beauty," he writes, " in 
 the well-kept secret of one's self and one's thoughts, 
 than in the display of a whole heaven that one may 
 have inside one." " My spirit," he answers the friends 
 who urge him to write, " is of the home-keeping order, 
 and has no fancy for adventure ; literary adventure is 
 above all distasteful to it ; for this, indeed (let me say so 
 without the least self-sufficiency), it has a contempt. 
 The literary career seems to me unreal, both in its own 
 essence and in the rewards which one seeks from it, and 
 therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity." His 
 acquaintances, and among them distinguished men of let- 
 ters, full of admiration for the originality and delicacy of 
 his talent, laughed at his self-depreciation, wannly as- 
 sured him of his powers. He received their assurances 
 with a mournful incredulity, which contrasts curiously 
 with the self-assertion of poor David Gray, whom I just 
 now mentioned. " It seems to me intolerable," he writes, 
 " to appear to men other than one appears to God. My 
 worst torture at this moment is the over-estimate which 
 generous friends form of me. We are told that at the 
 last judgment the secret of all consciences will be laid 
 bare to the universe ; would that mine were so this day. 
 
12 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 and that every passer-by could see me as I am ! " " High 
 above my head," he says at another time, "far, far away, 
 I seem to hear the murmur of that world of thought and 
 feeling to which I aspire so often, but where I can never 
 attain. I think of those of my own age who have wings 
 strong enough to reach it, but I think of them without 
 jealousy, and as men on earth contemplate the elect 
 and their felicity." And, criticising his own composition, 
 "When I begin a subject, my self-conceit" (says this ex- 
 quisite artist) " imagines I am doing wonders j and when 
 I have finished, I see nothing but a wretched made-up 
 imitation, composed of odds and ends of color stolen from 
 other people's pallets, and tastelessly mixed together on 
 mine." Such was his passion for perfection^ his disdain 
 for all poetical work not perfectly adequate and felicitous. 
 The magic of expression to which by the force of this 
 passion he won his way, will make the name of Maurice 
 de Guerin remembered in literature.* 
 
 * The remainder of Professor Arnold's essay would needlessly 
 anticipate matter to be contained in the volume of Letters and Liter- 
 ary Remains of Maurice de Guerin. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE ORIGINAL EDITION, 
 
 BY 
 
 G. S. T REB U TIEN. 
 
 SHALL write only a few lines at the begin- 
 ning of this volume. The collection and 
 arrangement of the material have been done 
 by me : but it is not my province to speak 
 of the author. I will here merely say that at a time 
 already distant, I knew Maurice de Guerin; I loved 
 him, and lived with him in an intimacy which is the 
 honor of my life, and to-day my chief joy. 
 
 The friends of Maurice have always regarded the 
 publication of his manuscripts as a duty lending lustre 
 to their own reputation. This publication, so ardently 
 desired, especially by his sister Eugenie, has been sus- 
 pended, owing to the delay of circumstances not worth 
 recalling, and which seem to have been in a manner 
 providential. At last it sees the light, and under most 
 
14 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 happy auspices. M. Sainte-Beuve, who for a long time 
 had been taking a sympathetic interest in the matter, 
 hastened to announce it in the Moniteur Universel, and, 
 with courtesy which is highly prized, has allowed me to 
 reproduce the fine sketch dedicated by him to the author of 
 The Centaur. A name of such weight as his, placed on 
 the title page of the book, not merely augurs success ; 
 it makes success certain. 
 
 The greater part of the fragments which I publish 
 were in the possession of the friends of Gudrin, who 
 fairly groaned in the knowledge that these fragments 
 were scattered like unknown diamonds, soon perhaps to 
 be lost. To me they have entrusted them, through a 
 choice which I have felt bound to recognize by laboring 
 with all my might to restore them these treasures re- 
 united and forever saved. They were inestimable relics, 
 for which they made it my duty to prepare a shrine. And 
 here let me say that I have put into the execution of this 
 sacred task, which I regard as my mission here below, 
 whatever there was best in me : conscientiousness, 
 scrupulous care, self-devotion, and complete and living 
 faith in the talent now consecrated by death. Some 
 years since, I visited the Valley of Arguenon in Brittany, 
 whence Maurice dated his finest inspirations. I wished 
 to see the places where he passed his happiest days, 
 the sea of which he sang, all the objects over which he 
 poured his spirit, and where I was desirous to mingle 
 somewhat of my own. If circumstances incidental and 
 personal have caused me to find the bitter drop mysteri- 
 ously hidden at the bottom of the sweetest cups, I am 
 doubly repaid by the consciousness of having accom- 
 plished the supreme desire of Eugenie, dead before the 
 day for which she waited, and by the pride I take (a 
 
Preface^ by G. S, 'Trebutien, 15 
 
 pride from which I cannot defend myself) in placing at 
 the beginning of Guerin's works, and under his name, 
 this signature of friendship and remembrance. 
 
 G. S. TREBUTIEN. 
 
 Caen Library, November 28, i860. 
 
 Postscript. November 30, 186 1. — Just a year since 
 the editor of Maurice de Guerin wrote the preceding 
 lines. The brief interval of a year has sufficed to justify 
 his anticipations and crown a success which has even 
 surpassed his hopes. 
 
 In prefacing this new edition, he had intended only 
 to record an acknowledgment of his gratitude for those 
 friendly voices which have contributed, through the Paris 
 press, to awaken public curiosity, and render familiar to 
 all a name which the publication of The Centaur, and 
 Madame Sand's article had, twenty years before, endeared 
 to a few. Unfortunately, there remains the discharge of a 
 more delicate duty. 
 
 Criticism, unanimous in recognizing the original talent 
 of Maurice de Guerin, was divided in seeking to deter- 
 mine the philosophic and religious ideas which had been 
 the source of his poetical inspiration. On this point, the 
 contest, traces of which we have not been allowed wholly 
 to efface from this volume, has been sufficiently lively to 
 alarm the sensitive conscience of a tender and pious 
 sister, the faithful custodian of the reputation of her 
 family, but even more firmly attached to the faith which 
 was equally that of all her household. In order to fore- 
 stall the secret wish of Mile. Marie de Guerin, and for 
 the mere sake of truth, M. A. Raynaud, a relative, who 
 was Maurice's best friend, and in a manner his second 
 father, beseeches M. de Marzan, as well as ourselves, " to 
 
1 6 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 present this Christian figure clear of every mist of un- 
 belief and irreligion." 
 
 We desire to fulfil a promise, which to us is sacred, 
 without being accused of renewing a discussion which at 
 any cost we would gladly have prevented, and even now 
 wish to close. Against the opinion of these writers, 
 whose sincerity, for the matter of that, we respect, and 
 for whose interest in a memoir which they professed, 
 after their fashion, to honor, we are duly grateful, we 
 shall not set up our individual opinion. It will suffice 
 to summon two witnesses whose testimony in our view of 
 the matter, is decisive. 
 
 One is Guerin himself 
 
 One evening in the month of December, 1833, he 
 was reading to his friends at the Valley of Arguenon 
 some passages from his Green Note-book. Struck with 
 certain vague expressions, M. de Marzan called Maurice's 
 attention to them : 
 
 " That is a grand idea," said he, " and undoubtedly 
 Christian at bottom ; but in the form of expression there 
 mingles, nevertheless, a marked tone of naturalism which 
 the pantheistic school could perhaps interpret to their 
 advantage." 
 
 The narrator thus continues : 
 
 " To my remark, so entirely unexpected, Guerin re- 
 plied at first by that involuntary smile to which the sud- 
 den thought of an improbable thing always gives rise ; 
 but seeing that I insisted, he readily vindicated himself 
 from the least suspicion of pantheism, and protested that 
 the passage meant this, and nothing more ; that the heart 
 of man was the point of union between heaven and 
 earth, and, as it were, the rendezvous, in humanity, J^f 
 God and man." 
 
Preface^ by G. S, Trebutietio 17 
 
 And Maurice offered, moreover, if he were mistaken, 
 to give up the point. 
 
 A voice issuing from the tomb, or rather descending 
 from heaven, will put an end to these discussions. 
 Doubts which the Journal of Maurice de Guerin might 
 leave on the mind, that of his sister Eugenie will easily 
 scatter. That touching oneness of feeling between 
 brother and sister people will believe. The truth is, that 
 during the three years preceding Guerin's marriage his 
 faith was lukewarm. At this time the progress of his 
 indifference can be noted. Nowhere can you find un- 
 belief. Lover and poet of Nature as he was, he had 
 never ceased to be Christian. The account of his last 
 moments will forbid our forgetting in what quarter his 
 heart sought for hope, and his soul for truth. On the 
 threshold of immortality, he had only to retire within 
 himself, there to find again, without effort and with joy 
 supreme, a faith which had slept at intervals, but which 
 had never been quenched. 
 
 A few words only on this second edition. We have 
 been able to revise the original manuscripts, with the 
 greater part of the letters, of which we previously had 
 only the copies made by Chopin — precious copies, and 
 for the most part exact, in which, nevertheless, we have 
 retrieved some errors and restored some undesirable 
 gaps. 
 
 It is possible the text has thus been improved in sev- 
 eral passages. But our greatest happiness has been to 
 add to the fragments published last year nearly thirty 
 new letters, and La Bacchante — a curious piece of com- 
 position in the style of The Centaur, the idea of which, 
 like that, came to Gudrin in one of those visits which we 
 used occasionally to make to the Musee des Antiques, 
 
i8 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 These additions make our collection complete, with 
 the exception of some verses which we have been com- 
 pelled to sacrifice, of a small number of letters which 
 were not at our disposal, or which were of those whose 
 confidential character Madame Sand has already regret- 
 ted did not allow of their being wholly transcribed. As 
 regards everything bordering on the domestic details of 
 life, there are limits where the most legitimate curiosity 
 should pause. 
 
 We can, therefore, hope that our mission is fulfilled, 
 and it is with a feeling of profound acknowledgment that 
 we give thanks to God for having left us the time and 
 strength necessary to conduct to a close the pious task 
 we had undertaken, and which, spite of many difficulties, 
 we have pursued in sorrow and love. — G. S. T. 
 
1^ 
 
 MEMOIR 
 
 OF 
 
 MAURICE DE GUERIN, 
 
 M. SAINTE BEUVE. 
 
 JN the fifteenth of May, 1840, the Revue des 
 Deux Mofides published an article of George 
 Sand on a young poet whose name was en- 
 tirely unknown up to that time — Georges- 
 Maurice DE GuERiN, who had died the preceding year, 
 on the nineteenth of July, 1839, aged twenty-nine years. 
 What secured him the posthumous honor of being thus 
 suddenly classed, with the rank of a star, among the 
 poets of France, was a magnificent and singular compo- 
 sition, The Centaur, in which all the original forces of 
 the natural man were felt, expressed, energetically per- 
 sonified, always with taste and moderation, and which 
 showed at once the hand of a master — "the Andrd 
 Chenier of pantheism," as a friend had already named 
 him. 
 
 Around this colossal piece of antique marble, frag- 
 
20 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 ments quoted from letters, outpourings which revealed a 
 tender and beautiful soul, formed, as it were, a charming 
 group, partially veiled, of half confidences ; and glimpses 
 caught in passing created an eager desire for the rest. 
 There was from that time among the young a little cho- 
 sen school, a scattered band of admirers, who named the 
 name of Guerin, who rallied around this youthful mem- 
 ory, reverenced it with secret fervor, and longed for the 
 moment which should yield them the finished work — when 
 the entire soul should be disclosed to them. Twenty 
 years have since slipped away, and difficulties, objections, 
 scruples, of every kind and of the most delicate nature, 
 had delayed the fulfilment of the vow consecrated to art 
 by friendship. Gudrin had already had time to be imi- 
 tated by other poets, who seemed quite unconscious of 
 this imitation, and his own v/orks had not been published 
 and brought to light. In the interval, however, five years 
 after, appeared, with the reservation, at first, of a partial 
 publicity, the Reliques of a sister of the poet, Eugenie de 
 Guerin, his equal, if not his superior in talent and soul. 
 The desire finally to know and possess the complete 
 works of the brother was thereby increased, and, as it 
 were, stimulated. We are happy to announce that they 
 are about to appear ; faithful friends have selected and 
 prepared the material ; and the learned and poetical 
 antiquary, M. Trebutien, devoting his attention to it as a 
 fervent monk of the middle ages would have done to the 
 writing and illuminating of a holy missal, the treasure of 
 his abbey, has procured their publication. 
 
 Nothing was exaggerated in the first impression re- 
 ceived in 1840 ; everything is to-day justified and con- 
 firmed ; the modern school, in fact, counts one poet, one 
 landscape-painter the more. I must first refer him to 
 
Memoir J by M. Saint e Beuve, 21 
 
 his true epoch, to his real beginnings. It was in 1833 
 that Maurice de Gu^rin, who was then only in his twenty- 
 third year, began to develop and expand in the circle of 
 friendship that first flower of sentiment, which has at 
 length been exhibited to us, and which is to yield us all 
 its perfume. Born on the fifth of August, 18 10, he be- 
 longed to that second generation of the century, which 
 was no longer two or three, but ten or eleven years old 
 when it produced that new flock, the Mussets, the Monta- 
 lemberts, the Guerins ; — I purposely write these names 
 together. Born under the beautiful sky of the South, of 
 an ancient family, noble and poor, Maurice de Guerin, a 
 dreamer from his childhood, turned early toward religious 
 ideas, and inclined, without effort, to the thought of the 
 ecclesiastical profession. He Vv^as not yet twelve, when, in 
 the early days of January, 1822, he left for the first time — 
 poor exiled bird ! — his turrets of Cayla, and arrived at 
 Toulouse, to carry on his studies, — I believe, at the little 
 seminaiy. He came to Paris to complete them, at 
 Stanislas College. It was on his departure from there, 
 after having hesitated some time, after having returned 
 to his family and seen his sisters and their friends, that, 
 disturbed, sensitive, and even, it is suspected, secretly 
 wounded, he went to La Chenaie to seek repose, forget- 
 fulness, rather than to carry thither the religious voca- 
 tion, already a well-travelled profession, and very uncer- 
 tain. 
 
 He had loved, he had wept and sung his sorrows dur- 
 ing a season passed in his beautiful South, the last 
 before his departure for La Chenaie. Witness these 
 verses, dated at La Roche d'Onelle, which refer to the 
 autumn of 1832 : 
 
22 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 The delving ages, o'er this wrinkled steep, 
 Deep clefts have worn, where raindrops, nestling, sleep ; 
 And passing birds here stay their evening flight, 
 To drink with eager beak this pure delight. 
 But to Onella's rock I come, forlorn, 
 vThe broken spell of my first love to mourn ; 
 Here breaks my suffering heart, here rains its tears, 
 Whose gathered flow the channelled rock upbears ; 
 Then hover not, ye passing doves, too near ; 
 This water shun — 'tis bitter with a tear. 
 
 A young Greek, a disciple of Theocritus or Moschus, 
 could not have spoken better than this young Levite who 
 seemed in search of an apostle. 
 
 He arrived at La Chenaie at the beginning of win- 
 ter ; he was there on Christmas, 1832 ; he had found his 
 asylum. La Chenaie, " that species of oasis in the midst 
 of the steppes of Brittany," where, in front of the castle, 
 stretches a vast garden, cut by a terrace planted with lin- 
 dens, with a little chapel at the back, was the retreat of 
 M. de Lamennais, of M. Felt (as he was familiarly 
 called) ; and he was accustomed to have about him four 
 or five young persons, who, in this country life, prose- 
 cuted their studies zealously, in a spirit of piety, of con- 
 templation, and of generous liberty. The period at 
 which Guerin arrived there was one of the most mem- 
 orable, one of the most decisive for the master ; this we 
 may say with certainty and precision, to-day, when we 
 have read the private correspondence of Lamennais 
 during this time. This great, impetuous soul, which 
 could rest only in extreme solutions, after having attempt- 
 ed the public union of Catholicism and Democracy, and 
 preached it in his journal in the tone of a prophet, had 
 been obliged to suspend the publication oi V Avenir. He 
 had made the journey to Rome to consult the supreme 
 
MemoiVy by M. Sainte Beuve. 23 
 
 authority ; he had returned, personally well-treated, but 
 very clearly disapproved of, and had appeared to submit. 
 Perhaps he thought himself sincerely submissive, even 
 while already meditating and revolving thoughts of ven- 
 geance and reprisal. M. de Lamennais, who is all one 
 thing or all another, without any medium, exhibited the 
 strangest contrast in his double nature. At one time, 
 and often, he had what Buffon, speaking of beasts of 
 prey, has called a soul of wrath ; again, and no less 
 often, he had a sweetness, a tenderness captivating to 
 little children, a spirit altogether charming ; and he 
 passed from one to the other in an instant. The veil 
 which has since been torn away, and which has exposed 
 the stormy and shifting foundation of his doctrines, had 
 then hardly been raised. None of those who knew and 
 loved M. de Lamennais, in those years of painful pas- 
 sion and of crisis, have been obliged, from any point of 
 view, it seems to me, to blush for or repent of that love. 
 He had attempted a union — impossible, I admit — but 
 the most dignified, the best calculated to please noble 
 hearts and generous and religious imaginations. Warned 
 that he was mistaken, and that he was not acknowledged, 
 he halted before the obstacle, he bowed before the sen- 
 tence : he suffered, he was silent, he prayed. When he 
 was closely observed at times, one would have said that 
 he was at the point of death. One day (the twenty- 
 fourth of March, 1833), sitting behind the chapel, under 
 the two Scotch firs which stood in this spot, he had taken 
 his stick and drawn a tomb on the sward, saying to one 
 of his disciples who was near him : " 'Tis there I wish to 
 lie ; but no monumental stone — a simple mound of turf 
 O ! how happy I shall be there ! " If he had died, in- 
 deed, at this moment, or in the months which followed ; 
 
24 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 if he had succumbed in his internal struggle, what a fair 
 and spotless memory would he have left ! What a re- 
 nown, as disciiDle, as hero, and even as martyr ! What a 
 mysterious subject of meditation and of reverie for those 
 who love to dwell u^^on great destinies interrupted ! 
 
 But we have nothing to do with him here except in 
 his relations to Maurice de Guerin. Admirer and prose- 
 lyte as he then was, the latter was to submit only in pass- 
 ing to the influence of Lamennais. A year or two later, 
 he was entirely emancipated and delivered from it. 
 Whether he freed himself by degrees from the faith, 
 whether he allowed himself gradually to be v/on by the 
 spirit of the age, it was not in the train of the great ajDos- 
 tate, but after his own fashion, and he erred in a path of 
 his own. In 1835 he was no longer the disciple of any 
 person nor of any system. After three years of an inde- 
 pendent and thoroughly Parisian life, at the approach of 
 death, his friends had the consolation of seeing him re- 
 embrace Christianity. 
 
 But if his emancipation was to take place through 
 the intellect, he still belonged fundamentally to the 
 world of La Chenaie through his sensibility, through 
 profound impressions, through the first and unmistakable 
 tokens of talent ; so that, in the literary perspective of 
 the past, he comes, although separate, to take a place as 
 one figure in the frame ; there he belongs, and there in 
 future he wdll remain, the landscape-painter, the artist, 
 the true poet. By the side of the dazzling names of 
 Montalembert, of Lacordaire, which resounded abroad 
 like trumpets, there was — who would have believed it ? — 
 in that silent and peaceful house, an obscure, timid young 
 man, whom Lamennais, abstracted in his apocalyptic 
 social visions, never distinguished from the others ; to 
 
Memoir y by M, de Saint e Beuve, 25 
 
 whom he gave credit for only ordinary powers, and who, 
 at the same time when his master was forging on his 
 anvil those thunderbolts called Les Paroles d^wi Croyant^ 
 was himself writing personal pages far more natural, 
 fresher — why not say, more beautiful ? — ^pages calculated 
 ever to thrill souls enamored of that universal life which 
 exhales and breathes in the heart of the woods, on the 
 shores of the sea. 
 
 Gu^rin arrived at La Chenaie in winter, in the depth 
 of the dead season, when everything is stripped, when 
 the forests are of a rust-color^ under that sky of Brittany 
 which is always cloudy, " and so low that it seems ready 
 to crush youj" but let spring come, the sky lifts, the 
 woods renew their life, and all smiles again. The win- 
 ter, however, is slow to depart ; the young and loving 
 observer notes in his journal its tardy flight, its frequent 
 returns : 
 
 "March 3^. — The hours of to-day have enchanted 
 me. The sun, for the first time in many days, has shown 
 himself in all his radiant beauty. He has unfolded the 
 buds of the leaves and flowers, and awakened in my 
 bosom a thousand tender thoughts. 
 
 " The clouds resume their light and graceful shapes, 
 and sketch the blue with charming fancies. The woods 
 have not yet their leaves ; but they take on I know not 
 what spirited and joyful air, which gives them an entirely 
 new face. Everything is preparing for the great holiday 
 of Nature." 
 
 This holiday, revealing tantalizing glimpses, tarries ; 
 many stormy days still intervene. All this is observed, 
 painted, and, above all, felt ; this young child of the 
 South draws from some indescribable native sadness a 
 special instinct for understanding and loving, from the 
 
26 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 first, the nature of this North, neighbor of the tem- 
 pest. 
 
 " March Wi. — A snowy day. A southeast wind curls 
 the snow in eddies, in great whirls of a dazzhng white- 
 ness. It melts as it falls. Here we are transported, as 
 it were, into the heart of winter, after a few spring smiles. 
 The wind is cold enough ; the little singing-birds, new- 
 comers, shiver, and the flowers, too. The chinks of the 
 partitions and sashes wail as in January ; and I, in my 
 poor wrapper, shrink into myself like Nature. 
 
 " (^th. — More snow, hail, blasts, cold. Poor Brit- 
 tany, thou sorely needest a little verdure to brighten thy 
 sombre face. Oh ! doff quickly, then, thy hooded win- 
 ter cloak, and let me see thee take thy light garment of 
 spring, tissue of leaves and flowers. When shall I 
 behold the skirts of thy robe fluttering at the will of the 
 winds ? 
 
 "11//2;. — It has snowed all night. My shutters, 
 poorly fastened, allowed me glimpses, as soon as I rose, 
 of that great sheet of white which had been silently 
 spread over the fields. The black trunks of the trees 
 rise like columns of ebony from the ivory-paved court of 
 a temple ; this severe and sharp contrast, and a certain 
 dejected manner in the woods, make one very sad. 
 Naught is heard ; not a living thing, save a few sparrows, 
 who take refuge, peeping as they go, in the fir-trees that 
 stretch their long arms laden with snow. The interior 
 of these bushy trees is impervious to frost ; it is a shel- 
 ter prepared by Providence ; the little birds know it well. 
 
 " I have visited our primroses : each was bearing its 
 little burden of snow, and bending its head under the 
 weight. These pretty flowers, so richly colored, present- 
 ed a charming effect under their Vv'hite hoods. I saw 
 
"^ Memoir^ by M, Sainte Beuve, 27 
 
 whole tufts of them covered with a single block of snow ; 
 all these laughing flowers, thus veiled, and leaning the 
 one against the other, seemed like a group of young 
 girls overtaken by a shower, and getting to shelter under 
 a white apron." 
 
 This recalls Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Gu^rin, with- 
 out any design, spontaneously, and by the affinity of 
 talent, is of his school. At this very time he was finish- 
 ing the perusal of his l^tudes de la Natiire^ and fresh 
 from the flavor of its charm : " It is one of those books 
 we wish would never end. There is little to be gained 
 from it for science, but much for poetiy, for the elevation 
 of the soul, and the contemplation of Nature. This book 
 sets free and enlightens a faculty which we all have, how- 
 ever veiled, vague, and almost totally bereft of energy ; 
 the faculty which gathers the beauty of Nature, and 
 hands it over to the soul." And he dwells upon this 
 second work of reflecting, which spiritualizes, which 
 blends and harmonizes into unity and subordinates to 
 one idea the actual features, once brought together. 
 This is precisely his own method : in the faithful pictures 
 of Nature which he offers us, man, the soul, is always in 
 the foreground : it is life reflected and interpreted by 
 life. His slightest sketches have thus their meaning and 
 their charm. 
 
 " \^th {March). — Took a walk in the forest of Coet- 
 quen. Happened upon a place remarkable for its wild- 
 ness : the road descends with a sudden pitch into a little 
 ravine, where flows a little brook over a slaty bed, which 
 gives its waters a blackish hue, disagreeable at first, but 
 which ceases to be so when you have noted its harmony 
 with the black trunks of the old oaks, the sombre ver- 
 dure of the ivies, and its contrast with the white ^nd 
 
28 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 glossy limbs of the birches. A strong north wind swept 
 through the forest, and caused it to utter deep roarings. 
 The trees, under the buffets of the wind, struggled like 
 madmen. Through the branches we saw the clouds, 
 flying rapidly in black and grotesque masses, and seem- 
 ing lightly to graze the tops of the trees. This great, 
 gloomy, floating veil, showed rents here and there, 
 through which glided a ray of sunshine, which fell like 
 a flash of lightning into the bosom of the forest. These 
 sudden passages of light gave to the majestic depths of 
 shade a haggard and weird aspect, like a smile on the 
 lips of the dead. 
 
 '■'■20th. — The winter is departing with a smile: it 
 bids us adieu with a brilliant sun shining in a sky pure 
 and smooth as a Venice glass. Another step of Time 
 accomplished. Oh ! why can it not, like the coursers of 
 the immortals, with four bounds reach the limits of its 
 lasting ? " 
 
 The methods of seeing and painting Nature are mani- 
 fold, and I allow them all, provided they possess truth. 
 But here, indeed, are bits of landscape painting quite to 
 my taste ; here is delicacy, feeling, and accurate drawing 
 all in one j the drawing is done from a near view, upon 
 the spot, and, faithful to Nature, is yet without crudity. 
 Nothing betrays the pallet. The colors have all their 
 freshness, their truth, and also a certain tenderness. 
 They have penetrated to the interior mirror, and are 
 seen by reflection. We catch here, above all, an expres- 
 sion ; we breath here the soul of things. 
 
 " 2Zth {March). — As often as we allow ourselves to 
 penetrate to Nature, our soul opens to the most touch- 
 ing impressions. There is something in Nature, whether 
 she decks herself in smiles during the bright days, or 
 
Memoir^ by M. Saint e Beuve, 29 
 
 becomes, as in autumn and winter, pale, gray, cold and 
 tearful, which stirs not only the surface of the spirit, but 
 even its most secret recesses, and awakens a thousand 
 memories which have apparently no connection with the 
 external aspect, but which, without doubt, sustain a re- 
 lation with the soul of Nature by sympathies to us un- 
 known. This marvellous power I have experienced 
 to-day, stretched in a grove of birches, and breathing 
 the warm air of spring. 
 
 ^^ April ^th. — A beautiful day as one could wish: 
 some clouds, but only as many as are needed to give 
 picturesqueness to the sky. They assume more and 
 more their summer forms. Their scattered groups re- 
 pose motionless under the sun, like flocks of sheep in 
 the pastures, during the heat of the day. I have seen a 
 swallow, and I have heard the bees humming over the 
 flowers. Seating myself in the sun, in order that I may 
 be saturated to the marrow with divine spring, I have 
 experienced some of the impressions of my childhood \ 
 for a moment I have regarded the sky with its clouds, 
 the earth with its forests, its songs, its murmurings, as 
 I did then. This renewing of the first aspect of things, 
 of the expression which our first thoughts put upon 
 them is, to my thinking, one of the sweetest influences 
 of childhood on the current of life." 
 
 But soon arise in him conflict and doubt. Guerin, 
 at this date, is still strictly Christian. He arraigns his 
 soul for responding with such liveliness to the insinuat- 
 ing delights of Nature, on a day of sacred contrition and 
 mourning, for this fifth of April was a Good-Friday. 
 The seclusion of penitence within which this Holy Week 
 confines him, wearies, and he reproaches himself for it. 
 Rule and revery are at war within him. He whose 
 
30 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 instinct it is to be in motion, to wander, to chase the 
 infinite in the breathings, in the murmurs of winds and 
 of waters, in the odors of budding, and the perfumes of 
 blossoming flowers, he who could say in planning jour- 
 neys : " It will be charming to stray about ; when we 
 wander, we feel that we fulfil the true condition of 
 humanity ; there lies, I think, the secret of the charm — " 
 he tries, at this point in his life, to reconcile Christianity 
 with devotion to Nature ; he seeks, if haply there may 
 be, a mystic relation between the worship of that 
 nature which culminates in the heart of man, and sacri- 
 fices itself there as on an altar, and the eucharistic 
 offering in the same heart. Vain effort! he attempts 
 the impossible and irreconcilable ; he will only succeed 
 in delaying, in his own case, his near, irresistible engulf- 
 ment. For there is no middle course : the Cross bars, 
 more or less, a free view of Nature ; Great Pan has 
 nothing in common with the crucified Divinity. A 
 certain distrustful and timid soberness is imposed, as a 
 first condition, upon the student of Christianity. And 
 Guerin, on the contrary, offers no resistance to this 
 temptation ; all the chance incidents of nature, an April 
 shower, a March flurry, the tender and capricious breezes 
 of May, all speak to him, lay hold of him, possess him, 
 transport him. In vain, he pauses in brief moments 
 and cries : " Heavens ! hov/ is it that my repose is 
 affected by what passes in the air, and that my soul's 
 peace is thus surrendered to the caprice of the winds ? " 
 He ceases not to surrender himself, he abandons himself 
 to it, he intoxicates himself with the life of things, and 
 wishes, at intervals, to be merged in its universality : 
 
 '■'• April 2^th. — It has just been raining. Nature is 
 fresh, radiant j the earth seems to taste with delight the 
 
Memoir, by M, Sainte Beuve, 31 
 
 water which brings it life. One would say that the birds' 
 throats are also refreshed by this rain : their song is 
 purer, more gushing, more i^iercing, and vibrates won- 
 derfully in the air — now become exquisitely sonorous 
 and echoing. The nightingales, the bullfinches, the 
 blackbirds, the thrushes, the orioles, the finches, the 
 wrens, all sing and rejoice. A goose, screaming like a 
 trumpet, adds to the charm by contrast. The motion- 
 less trees seem to listen to all these sounds. Innumer- 
 able apple-trees in flower look, from a distance, like balls 
 of snow ; the cherry-trees, also in white, rise in pyramids 
 or unfold in fans of flowers. 
 
 " The birds seem, at times, to aim at those orches- 
 tral effects in which all the instruments mingle in a maze 
 of harmony. 
 
 " If it were possible to identify ourselves with spring, 
 to carry this thought to the point of believing that all the 
 life, all the love which leavens Nature, culminates in our- 
 selves ; to feel ourselves at once flower, verdure, bird, 
 song, freshness, elasticity, delight, serenity : what would 
 become of me ? There are moments when, by dint of 
 concentrating one's thoughts on this idea, and of gazing 
 intently on Nature, one seems to experience some such 
 thing." 
 
 A month has elapsed j the period when spring, long 
 brooded and nursed, bursts forth, no longer in flowers, 
 but in leaves j when greenness overflows, when there 
 takes place in the space of tv/o or three mornings an 
 almost instantaneous flood of verdure — is admirably 
 given : 
 
 ^^May 3^. — A joyful day, full of sunshine ; a balmy 
 breeze, perfumes in the air; in the soul, bliss. The 
 verdure grows visibly; it has darted from the garden 
 
J2 
 
 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 into the copses ; it has got the upper hand all along the 
 pond ; it leaps, so to speak, from tree to tree, from 
 thicket to thicket, in the fields, and on the hillsides, and 
 I see where it has already reached the forest, and begins 
 to overflow upon its huge back. Soon it will have 
 spread as far as the eye can reach, and all these wide 
 spaces enclosed by the horizon, will be waving and mur- 
 muring like a vast sea, a sea of emerald. A few days 
 more, and we shall have all the pomp, all the display of 
 the vegetable kingdom." 
 
 And the time when all which was at first but flower 
 without the leaf, is now only germ and foliage, when the 
 loves of the plants are over, and when the nurture of the 
 fruit begins : 
 
 ^^ May 22d. — There are no longer flowers on the 
 trees. Their mission of love fulfilled, they are dead, 
 like a mother who perishes in giving life. The fruit has 
 set ; it feels the influence of the vital and reproductive 
 energy which is to throw upon the world new individ- 
 uals. An innumerable generation actually hangs on the 
 branches of all the trees, on the fibres of the most insig- 
 nificant grasses, like babes on the mother's breast. All 
 these germs, incalculable in their number and variety, 
 are there, suspended between heaven and earth in their 
 cradle, and given over to the winds, whose charge it is 
 to rock these beings. Unseen amid the living forests, 
 swing the forests of the future. Nature is all absorbed 
 in the vast cares of her maternity." 
 
 Although heartily devoted to Brittany, which he calls 
 the good country, the child of the South awakens at times 
 in Guerin; Mignon recalls the blue sky, and the land 
 where the olives bloom. The inmate of La Chenaie is 
 not deluded by these sylvan pageants, and rural beauties, 
 
Memoir y by M, Saint e Beuve. ^3 
 
 which are always so prone, in that region, again to be- 
 come dry and harsh ; La Chenaie, all Brittany " has the 
 air," he says, " of a gray and wrinkled old woman, trans- 
 formed by the fairies' wand into a young and most win- 
 ning girl of sixteen." But beneath the form of the win- 
 ning young girl, the old woman, on certain days reappears. 
 One morning in the midst of June, the fine weather 
 has vanished, one knows not whither; the west wind, 
 like a shepherd, driving before him his numberless flocks 
 of clouds, permeates everywhere. Side by side with 
 verdure is winter, and the contrast, moreover, is painful ; 
 and even when there is sunshine, in her days of high 
 festival, the summer of Brittany has always, to his feel- 
 ing, something gloomy, veiled, shut in. It is like a 
 miser making a display ; there is a churlishness in his 
 magnificence. 
 
 " Give me our sky of Languedoc, so lavish in light, 
 so blue, so widely arched ! " Thus cries, in these days, 
 almost like an exile, he who dreams of his soft nest at 
 Cayla and at Roche d'Onelle. In his excursions about 
 the country, and when he crosses the moors, then it is 
 that Nature appears to him barren and cheerless, in the 
 garb of wretchedness and poverty ; but, for all that, he 
 does not scorn her; on this theme he has composed 
 some very pungent verses, in which the ruggedness of 
 the country is truthfully rendered ; he understands it so 
 well, this ruggedness, he clasps it so closely, that he 
 triumphs over it. Like the Cybele of the Homeric 
 poem, who appeared at first under the disguise of a 
 barren old woman to the young girls seated by the way- 
 side, and who was then suddenly transformed into the 
 fruitful and glorious goddess. Nature, in Brittany, ends 
 by yielding to Gue'rin all that she possesses : if for a 
 
 2* 
 
h 
 
 34 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 moment he has slighted her, he quickly repents, and 
 she pardons him ; she ceases to appear ungrateful in 
 his eyes, she becomes again as beautiful as it is possible 
 for her to be : the moor itself becomes animated, invests 
 itself for him, even in its least details, with I know not 
 what charm. 
 
 These last things he says in verse, and it is for that 
 reason that I do not quote them. As to the verses of 
 Guerin, they are natural, easy, flowing, but unfinished. 
 He uses habitually, and from preference, a verse which I 
 know well, from having attempted in my day to introduce 
 and apply it — the familiar Alexandrine, adapted, in his 
 use, to a conversational tone, permitting all the intrica- 
 cies of a friendly talk. " Your poetry sings too much," 
 he wrote to his sister Eugenie ; " it does not talk 
 enough." He avoids the strophe, as breaking too easily 
 into a gallop, and running away with its rider ; he avoids 
 no less the Lamartinian verse, as rocking too gently its 
 dreaming gondolier. He believes that much may be 
 made of this Alexandrine verse, which, well handled, is 
 not so stiff as it appears to be ; which is capable of so 
 many fine turns, and even of charming carelessness. 
 This whole theory appears to me true, and it is also 
 mine. It is only in the application that Guerin is at 
 fault, as we ourselves may have been ; but he errs more 
 than is necessary, and far too much. Above all, he trusts 
 too much to chance ; and what he said of another of his 
 friends may be said of him, that his verse gushes from 
 him ^^ like water from a fountain.^'' He has detached 
 lines which are very happy, very free ; but his style 
 drags, is tedious, and becomes complicated like prose. 
 He knows not how to prune, to time his periods, and, 
 after a certain number of uneven, irregular verses, to 
 
Memoir y by M, Saint e Beuve, 35 
 
 restore the full tone and mark the rhythm. The name 
 of Brizeux, the Breton poet, is naturally associated with 
 that of Gudrin, the Breton landscape-painter. Gudrin 
 must have read the Marie of Brizeux, but I do not see 
 that he speaks of it. We must exaggerate nothing : this 
 pretty Marie^ in her first dress, was only a little peasant, 
 dressed up according to the custom and standard of 
 Paris. It was not until later that Brizeux thought seri- 
 ously of making himself Breton. In the poem by him 
 which bears this title, Les Bretons, he has succeeded in 
 two or three grand and forcible pictures ; as a whole, it 
 lacks interest, and is destitute of charm. I do not speak 
 of the various collections which have followed, and 
 which, save some rather rare fragments, are only the un- 
 promising efforts, more and more abrupt, of an arid and 
 exhausted vein. Now, what Guerin had preeminently, 
 was impulse, raciness, charm, breadth, and power. The 
 author of the Ce?itaiir is of another order than the dis- 
 creet lover of Marie. But Brizeux, in verse, is artistic, 
 and Guerin is not sufficiently so. Brizeux has the sci- 
 ence of poetry ; and if he allows his impulse too little 
 play ; if, for good reasons, he never sets it free ; if he 
 never has what the generous poet Lucretian calls the mag- 
 num immissis ceriameft hahenis — the headlong charge with 
 loosened rein — at least he keeps the folds of his garment 
 well girdled, and has skilful and charming ways of clasp- 
 ing it. 
 
 In 1833, Guerin, this Breton by adoption, who was 
 then far more of a Breton in spirit than Brizeux, lived in 
 the full enjoyment of this rural, tranquil, poetic, and 
 Christian life, whose vital current pulsated through his 
 genius, and diffused itself freshly in his private writings. 
 I am aware he had his troubles, his failures of the inner 
 
^6 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 life : we shall return, if only to point it out, to this weak 
 side of his soul and his will. His talent, later, will be 
 more manly, at the same time that his conscience is less 
 disturbed ; here, he appears in all the delicate bloom of 
 youth. There was a single moment when every tint 
 could be noted, when his ideas harmonized and blended. 
 Imagine, at La Chenaie, which was still called a religious 
 house, on Easter-day of this year 1833 — the seventh of 
 April — a radiant morning, and the touching scene then 
 for the last time enacted. He who was still the Abbd 
 Lamennais was celebrating the Easter mass in the 
 chapel — his last mass — and was administering the Com- 
 munion with his own hand to a few young disciples, who, 
 still faithful, believed him faithful also : they were 
 Guerin, Elie de Kertanguy, Francois du Breil de Mar- 
 zan, a fervent young poet, overjoyed in bringing to the 
 holy table a new recruit, a friend older by ten years — 
 Hippolyte de la Morvonnais, himself a poet. There 
 were at this time at La Chenaie, or on the point of 
 arriving, certain men whose meeting and intercourse was 
 a source of pure joy : the Abbe Gerbet, a gentle soul of 
 tender affability ; the Abbe Cazales, a loving heart, and 
 wise in the ways of the inner life ; other names, some of 
 which have been since noted in divers branches of sci- 
 ence : Eugene Bore, Frederic de la Provostaye — alto- 
 gether a pious and learned band. Who would have said 
 then, to those who still clustered round the master, that 
 he who had just administered the communion to them 
 with his own hand, would administer it no more, would 
 refuse it himself forever, and would soon have for a de- 
 vice — only too appropriate — an oak shattered by the tempest, 
 with this haughty motto : "/ break, and bend not P' — a 
 Titanic device, presumptuous as Capaneus. 
 
Memoir^ by M, Saint e Beuve, 37 
 
 " Oh, if we had then been told it, what a shudder 
 would have passed through our veins ! " wrote one of 
 them. But for us, whose only business here is to speak 
 of literature, it is impossible not to notice such a mem- 
 orable epoch in the religious history of the time, not to 
 connect therewith the talent of Guerin, and not to regret 
 that the impetuous master-mind, which was already 
 brewing storms, had not then done as did the obscure 
 disciple standing in the shadow of his wing : that he had 
 not opened his heart and his ear to some strains of the 
 pastoral flute ; that, instead of letting himself loose in 
 imagination upon society, and seeing in it only hell, dun- 
 geons, cellars, sinks of iniquity (visions which constantly 
 came back and beset him), he had not more frequently 
 looked toward Nature, there to soften and calm himself 
 And yet, this same M. Lamennais wrote, some months 
 after, to one of his religious friends in Italy : " You are 
 on the threshold of spring, earlier than in France, in the 
 country that you inhabit ; I hope that it will have a hap- 
 py influence upon your health. Abandon yourself to all 
 the sweetness of this season of renewal ; be a flower 
 with the flowers. We lose, by our own fault, a part — the 
 greatest part — of the blessings of the Creator ; He sur- 
 rounds us with His gifts, and we refuse to enjoy them by 
 I know not what dreary determination to torment our- 
 selves. In the midst of an atmosphere of perfumes 
 which emanates from Him, we make one for ourselves, 
 composed of all the deadly vapors that our cares, our 
 anxieties, and our griefs exhale — fatal bell of the diver 
 which isolates us in the bosom of a vast ocean." 
 
 And who, pray, had taken his post in this bell, and 
 liked to stay there better than himself? 
 
 I have still something to say upon this position of 
 
38 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 Gudrin at La Chenaie and in Brittany, upon this nursing 
 season of his talents. 
 
 Since I have spoken of Lamennais at this date of 
 1833, and such as he still appeared in the eyes of this 
 faithful circle, how is it possible to avoid calling atten- 
 tion to the portrait that Guerin has sketched of him, in a 
 letter of the sixteenth of May to M. de Bayne de Rays- 
 sac, one of his southern friends ? It is decidedly the 
 most living, speaking likeness of that side of Lamennais 
 in which, by merely reading him, it is difficult to believe ; 
 one view of a soul which appeared to forget itself en- 
 tirely in conversation, so gay and charming was it, and 
 which then would be so quickly eclipsed that his brow 
 would wrinkle and his countenance suddenly grow dark. 
 Guerin shows him to us as he saw him, in his happiest 
 mood, and sometimes in the pride of his strength, but 
 without the dark tints. The letters of Guerin to his 
 friends serve to fill out the impressions noted in his jour- 
 nal during this time ; and some of the pages of this jour- 
 nal are themselves only extracts from his letters which 
 seemed to him, before passing from his hand, deserving 
 of being copied. In fact, the artist, the painter in him, 
 boldly making his studies, was trying his hand. One of 
 the holidays he most anticipated, which he had promised 
 himself from his first arrival in Brittany, was a little trip 
 to the seaside. On the twenty-eighth of March, in a 
 walk pushed further than usual with the Abb^ Gerbet 
 and another companion, he had obtained his first glimpse 
 to the north, from the summit of a hill, of the bay of 
 Cancale, its waters sparkling in the distance, and mark- 
 ing the horizon with a luminous bar. But the actual 
 journey which enabled him to exclaim, "At last, I have 
 seen the ocean ! " was not accomplished until the elev- 
 
Memoir y by M, Saint e Beuve. 39 
 
 enth of April. That day, the Thursday after Easter, he 
 set out, at one o'clock in the afternoon, with fine weather 
 and a fresh breeze, on foot, in company with Edmond de 
 Cazales, who had not yet taken orders. They had not 
 less than six or seven leagues to go ; but travelling 
 towards a great goal, and travelling thither by a long 
 route, with a friend, is a twofold happiness. Guerin felt 
 both, so he has told us : " It is a preeminent pleasure to 
 travel — to visit the ocean with so congenial a travelling 
 companion. Our conversation flowed, as it were, a 
 steady stream, from La Chenaie to Saint Malo ; and, our 
 six leagues accomplished, I could have wished to see still 
 before us a long stretch of road ; for, indeed, conversa- 
 tion is one of those sweet things that we wish to prolong 
 forever." He gives us an idea of these interviews, em- 
 bracing the world of the heart with that of nature, and 
 rambling through the romance, the recollections, the 
 hopes, and all the charming studies of youth. These 
 pleasant talks, I imagine, resembled in spirit what must 
 have been those of Basil and Gregory in the neighbor- 
 hood of Athens, and those of Augustine and his friends 
 on the shores of Ostia. The beauty of the picturesque 
 descriptions, of the sea-sketches which follow, is thereby 
 enhanced ; these lofty communings furnish the sky of 
 the picture. 
 
 The last days which Guerin passed at La Chenaie 
 were full of pleasure, but a pleasure that was often dis- 
 turbed j he felt, in fact, that this life of retirement was 
 drawing to a close, and that the vacation would bring for 
 him the necessity of making a decision. He enjoyed so 
 much the more, when his imagination permitted, the uni- 
 form and deep calm of the last hours. 
 
 The seventh of September, at four o'clock in the 
 
40 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 afternoon, he went up to the chamber of M. Feli, and 
 bade him good-by. After a nine months' sojourn, "the 
 gates of the Httle paradise of La Chenaie closed behind 
 him." The ambiguous and distressing relations of M. 
 de Lamennais with the diocesan authority, had of late 
 become more complicated, and it was found expedient to 
 break up the little school. Guerin, however, did not yet 
 leave Brittany, and remained there until the end of Janu- 
 ary, 1834; now at La Brousse, in the family of M. de 
 Marzan ; now at Le Val de 1' Arguenon, in the retreat of 
 his friend Hippolyte de la Morvonnais ; now at Mor- 
 dreux, with the latter's father-in-law. Here occurred a 
 new and important crisis in his life. He had brought to 
 La Chenaie a secret heart-trouble — I do not say a pas- 
 sion, but a sentiment. A view of certain beeches which 
 he could see from his window towards the pond, and 
 which recalled painfully sweet recollections, revived this 
 sentiment. Some nights he dreamed ; listen to one of 
 his dreams : 
 
 '•^ June \^th. — '•Strange dream !^ I dreamed that I 
 was alone in a vast cathedral. I seemed to be in the 
 presence of God, and in that state of the soul in which 
 one is conscious only of God and of oneself, when a voice 
 arose. This voice — the voice of a woman, infinitely 
 sweet — nevertheless filled the whole church like a vast 
 chorus. I recognized it at once ; it was the voice of 
 Louise, ^silver-sweet sowtdingJ " 
 
 Such dreams, which recall those of the youthful 
 Dante, and of the Vita JViiova, belonged only to the 
 intellectual heights of his nature, and were susceptible of 
 cure. And if we should say here all that we think, 
 Guerin was not made for a great and passionate suffering 
 of love. One day, some years after, reading the letters 
 
Memoir y by M, Saint e Beuve, 41 
 
 of Mile, de Lespinasse, and finding in them a passion by 
 him unfelt, he was greatly affected, and was surprised at 
 his emotion : " In truth," said he, " I knew not there 
 existed an imagination so tender, which could thus agi- 
 tate my heart. Is it that I know not the measure of this 
 heart? It is not made for that passion which says, 
 * Let me love, let me see you, or cease to exist ! ' " No 
 circumstance of his life, not even the inclination which 
 determined his marriage, has ever contradicted this judg- 
 ment which he passed upon himself ; he loved only on 
 the surface, and, as it were, outside the inner curtain of 
 his soul ; its depths remained mysterious and sacred. I 
 should say that he, the lover of Nature, felt the univer- 
 sality of things too deeply to love any single object. 
 However this may be, he had a pang at that time ; and 
 finding himself, on leaving lonely La Chenaie, in the ten- 
 der home-circle of Hippolyte de la Morvonnais and his 
 young wife, this sorrow was healed. He was one of 
 those whom the friendly sympathy of a young woman 
 soothes rather than excites. The pure friendship of the 
 chaste wife, and the happiness of which he was witness, 
 without effacing or banishing the other image, caused it 
 to fade into a faint shadow. Everything came right j 
 and Guerin, on the eve of plunging into the m^lee of the 
 world, enjoyed some months of perfect peace. 
 
 The sketches in which he reproduces those autumn 
 and winter days passed by the side of the sea, in this 
 hospitable home, in this " TMbaide des Greves" as La 
 Morvonnais rather ambitiously called it, are beautiful 
 pages, which rank, by their innate force, with the best 
 that we know in this style. The thrilling contrast of 
 this peaceful fireside with the almost incessant storms of 
 the ocean — sometimes that other contrast, no less strik- 
 
42 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 ing, between the calm sea, the slumber of the fields, and 
 the stormy heart of the beholder — give to the different 
 pictures all their life and variety : 
 
 *' And see how full of goodness Providence is to me ! 
 For fear that the sudden transition from the mild and 
 tempered air of a religious and solitary life to the torrid 
 zone of the world should try my soul too sorely, it has 
 led me, on leaving the holy retreat, into a home standing 
 on the confines of the two regions, where, without being 
 in solitude, one still belongs not to the world ; a house 
 whose windows, on one side, open upon the plain where 
 sways the tumult of man, and, on the other, upon a 
 desert where chant the servants of God ; on one side 
 upon the ocean, on the other upon the woods : and this 
 figure is a reality, for the house is built upon the border 
 of the sea. I wish to record here the history of my 
 sojourn in it, for the days passed here are full of happi- 
 ness ; and I know that, in the future, I shall turn back 
 many a time to reperuse their vanished joy. A religious 
 man and a poet; a woman so well fitted to him that 
 they seem but a twofold soul ; a child who is named for 
 her mother, Marie^ and the first rays of whose love 
 and intelligence are piercing, like a star, the white cloud 
 of childhood ; a simple life, in an old house ; the ocean, 
 morning and evening, sending us its harmonies ; finally, 
 a traveller descending from Carmel to go to Babylon, 
 who, laying down his staff and sandals, has seated him- 
 self at the hospitable door ; here is material for a biblical 
 poem, if I could write things as I can feel them." 
 
 I do not miss this biblical poem ; he will tell us 
 enough about it, even in saying that he knows not how. 
 By-and-by we shall have the finest page of it ; but first, 
 let us enjoy with him the view of a sea in commotion^ 
 
Memoir^ by M, Sainte Beuve, 43 
 
 and, at the same time, of the human soul contemplating 
 it : ^^ ^'^'J^- 
 
 ^ Yesterday the wind blew furiously from the west. 
 I have seen the sea in commotion ; but this tumult, sub- 
 lime as it is, is far inferior, to my taste, to the view of 
 the ocean calm and blue. But why say that the one is 
 not equal to the other ? Who could measure these two 
 sublime sights, and say. The second surpasses the first ? 
 We must simply say. My soul finds more pleasure in the 
 calm than in the storm. Yesterday one wide battle 
 waged on the watery plains. To see the leaping waves, 
 the thought would come of those countless squad- 
 rons of Tartars galloping incessantly over the plains of 
 Asia. The entrance to the bay is guarded, as it were, 
 by a chain of granite islets. It was glorious to see the 
 surges rushing to the assault, and hurling themselves 
 frantically, with frightful clamors, against those masses of 
 rock j to see them take their line of attack, and vie with 
 each other which should first surmount the black head 
 of the reefs. The boldest, or the most agile, vaulted 
 over with a loud shout ; the others, lumbering on more 
 awkwardly, dashed against the rock, flinging showers of 
 spray of a dazzling whiteness, and fell back with a low, 
 muffled growling, like watch-dogs beaten back by the 
 traveller's staff. We witnessed these wild struggles from 
 the top of a cliff, where we found it difficult to withstand 
 the fury of the wind. There we were, with bodies bent 
 forward, legs planted apart to give a wider base for re- 
 sisting with greater advantage, and both hands clutching 
 our hats to keep them on our heads. The vast tumult of 
 the sea, the clamorous rush of the waves, the equally 
 rapid but silent sweep of the clouds, the sea-birds hover- 
 ing in the sky and balancing their slender bodies be- 
 
44 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 tween two arched wings that seemed to spread indefi- 
 nitely — this entire assemblage of wild and echoing har- 
 monies, all centring in the souls of two beings five feet 
 high, planted upon the crest of a cliff, shaken like leaves 
 by the violence of the wind, and hardly more visible in 
 that immensity than two birds perched upon a clod of 
 earth — oh ! it was something mysterious and awful — one 
 of those mingled moments of sublime excitement and 
 profound meditation, when the soul and Nature, drawing 
 themselves to their full height, confront each other. 
 
 " A few steps from us, a group of children, sheltered 
 behind a rock, tended a flock scattered over the bluffs of 
 the coast. 
 
 " Throw into this sea-picture a ship in danger, all is 
 changed : we see only the ship. Happy he who can con- 
 template Nature waste and uninhabited ! Happy he who 
 can see her abandoned to her terrible sports without 
 danger to any living being ! Happy he who beholds 
 from the top of a mountain the lion bounding and roar- 
 ing in the plain, when no traveller, nor even a gazelle, is 
 haply passing ! That happiness, Hippolyte, we had yes- 
 terday ; let us thank Heaven for it.^/ 
 
 Have the English fireside poets — Cowper, Words- 
 worth — ever described more deliciously the joys of a 
 pure home, and its domestic happiness — that remem- 
 brance of Eden — than the traveller who, sitting for a mo- 
 ment under a blessed roof, has done in these words : 
 
 "20//^. — I havfe never enjoyed with so much intimacy 
 and seclusion the happiness of home life. Never has 
 the perfume which is wafted through all the rooms of a 
 religious and happy house so completely enveloped me. 
 It is like a cloud of invisible incense that I breathe con- 
 tinually. All these minute details of familiar life, whose 
 
Memoir^ by M. Sainte Beuve. 45 
 
 successive links constitute my day, are so many shades 
 of a perpetual delight, which goes on unfolding from the 
 beginning to the end of the day. 
 
 '"■'^The morning greeting, which renews in some sort 
 the pleasure of my first arrival, (for we accost each other 
 in nearly the same form of words, and, besides, the separa- 
 tion at night is somewhat typical of longer separations, 
 like them, full of dangers and uncertainties ;) the breakfast 
 hour, when we forthwith celebrate the joy of reunion ; the 
 subsequent walk, a sort of greeting and adoration that 
 we offer to Nature ; our return, and our seclusion in an 
 old wainscoted chamber, looking out on the sea, inacces- 
 sible to the noise of the house — in a word, a perfect 
 sanctuary of labor ; dinner, announced to us not by the 
 sound of the bell, which savors too much of the college 
 or a fine house, but by a gentle voice ; the gayety, the 
 lively jests, the rippling flow of talk, rising and falling 
 during the entire meal ; the crackling fire of dry brush 
 around which we draw our chairs just afterwards ; the 
 tender things we say in the warmth of the fire, roaring as 
 we chat ; and, if the weather is fine, the stroll by the 
 side of the ocean, which runs to welcome our party — a 
 mother, her child in her arms, the father of the child, 
 and a stranger, these last two each with a stick in his 
 hand ; the rosy lips of the little girl who prattles to the 
 tune of the waves, the tears that she sometimes sheds, 
 and the cries of childish grief on the border of the sea ; 
 our thoughts, when we see the mother and child smiling 
 at each other, or the child weeping, and the mother seek- 
 ing to soothe her with the sweetness of her caresses and 
 her voice ; the ocean, which goes on rolling continuously 
 its waves and noises ; the dead branches that we cut as 
 we stray hither and thither in the copses, to make a 
 
46 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 quick and cheerful fire on our return ; this little experi- 
 ment in woodcraft which brings us near to Nature, and 
 makes us think of M. Fall's peculiar love for the same 
 occupation ; the hours of study and poetic outpouring, 
 which carry us along to supper-time ; this meal, to which 
 we are summoned by the same gentle voice, spent in the 
 same pleasures as the dinner-hour, but less boisterous, 
 because evening softens and subdues everything; the 
 evening, opening with the sparkle of a cheerful fire, and 
 passing in alternate reading and talking, to die away in 
 sleep : to all the charms of a day thus spent, add that 
 indescribable, angelic beaming, that halo of peace, of 
 freshness and innocence, diffused by the blonde hair, the 
 blue eyes, the silvery voice, the laughter, the little know- 
 ing poutings of a child who, I feel certain, makes more 
 than one angel jealous ; who enchants you, bewitches 
 you, makes you dotingly fond by a simple motion of her 
 lips — such is the power of helplessness \ to all this 
 add, finally, the dreams of the imagination, and you will 
 still be far from attaining the limit of all these domestic 
 delights/' 
 
 However, these family joys, too keenly felt by a heart 
 to whom it was not given to taste them for himself, 
 affected him too tenderly ; he had arrived, he tells us, at 
 the pitch of weeping for a mere nothing, " as do little 
 children and old men." This continual calm, this pleas- 
 ant monotony of domestic life, prolonged like a sweet 
 but unvarying note, had finished by enervating, by un- 
 duly exalting him, by either putting him beside himself, 
 or by placing him too early in possession of his own na- 
 ture. Excess of tranquillity was for him a new kind of 
 storm ; his soul was " in peril," and there was danger in 
 this direction of an intoxication of languor, if he had not 
 
r 
 
 MemoiVy by M, Sainte Beuve. 47 
 
 found a counterpoise, a powerful diversion in the con- 
 templation of Nature, as at other moments there had 
 been danger that the sovereign attraction, the potent 
 voice of this Nature, would absorb and master him com- 
 pletely. For Gu^-in's soul was marvellously sensitive 
 and susceptible, but without safeguard or defence against 
 itself. This time he was wise enough to turn aside in 
 time, and vary the exercise of his sensibility : 
 ^ '"I set about studying her (Nature) even more closely J^/*- 
 than had been my wont, and by degrees the excitement 
 subsided ; for there issued from fields, from waves, from 
 woods a mild and wholesome virtue, which penetrated 
 my being and changed all my transports to melancholy 
 dreams. This blending of the calm suggestions of Na- 
 ture with the stormy ecstasies of the heart will beget a 
 state of mind which I would fain retain, for it is a most 
 desirable state for a restless dreamer like myself. It is 
 like a rapture so subdued and tranquil that it carries the 
 soul out of itself, without taking from it the conscious- 
 ness of a lingering and somewhat stormy sadness. An- 
 other result is, that the soul is insensibly steeped in a 
 languor which deadens the keenness of every intellectual 
 faculty, and lulls it into a half-sleep void of all thought, 
 in which, nevertheless, it is conscious of the faculty of 
 dreaming the most beautiful things. 
 
 ^"Nothing can more faithfully represent this state of 
 the soul than the evening this moment falling. Gray 
 clouds, whose edges are slightly silvered, are spread 
 uniformly over the v/hole face of the sky. The sun, 
 which vanished a few moments ago, has left behind him 
 light enough to relieve for some time the black shadows, 
 and, in a manner, to tone the falling darkness. The 
 winds are hushed, and the tranquil ocean sends up, 
 
48 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 when I go out on the threshold to Hsten, only a melo- 
 dious murmur which breaks on the soul like a beautiful 
 wave on the beach. The birds, the first to be won by 
 the influence of night, take their flight towards the woods, 
 and their wings are heard rustling in the clouds. The 
 copse which covers the whole hillside of Le Val, which 
 has echoed all day with the warbling of the wren, with 
 the cheerful whistle of the woodpecker, and with the 
 various notes of a multitude of birds, has no longer any 
 sound in its paths and thickets, save the shrill cry of 
 blackbirds chasing each other in their play, after all other 
 birds have their heads under their wings. The noise of 
 man, always the last to be hushed, gradually dies away 
 along the fields. The universal hum ceases, and one 
 hears scarcely a sound except what comes from the 
 towns and hamlets, where, far into the night, are heard 
 the crying of children and the barking of dogs. Silence 
 enfolds me ; everything seeks repose, except my pen, 
 which haply disturbs the slumber of some living atom, 
 asleep in the leaves of my notebook, for it makes its own 
 little noise scratching these foolish thoughts. Well ! let 
 let it cease, then ; for what I write, have written, and 
 shall write, can never be weighed against the sleep of an 
 atom.)' 
 
 - Surely, that is as beautiful as beautiful verses. They 
 talk of the Lake poets and their poetry, and La Morvon- 
 nais, about this time, was very much taken up with them, 
 so far as to go and visit Wordsworth at his residence at 
 Rydal Mount, near the Lakes of Westmoreland, and to 
 carry on a correspondence with that great and tranquil 
 soul, that patriarch of the domestic muse. Gudrin, with- 
 out giving so much thought to it, was more like the Lake 
 poets, without in any way aiming to imitate them. There 
 
Memoir^ by M. Sainte Beuve, 49 
 
 is in their writings no purer pastoral sonnet, there is in 
 the poetic rambles of Cowper no more transparent pic- 
 ture, than the page we have just read, in its painting, 
 at once so true and so tender, so clear and so emotional. 
 The modest sentiment with which he closes, and in which 
 he takes thought for the smallest living atom, might be 
 the envy of a gentle poet of India. 
 
 But it was for Guerin to tear himself from this soli- 
 tude, where he was on the point of forgetting himself and 
 of tasting too freely the fruit of the lotos. In a last walk, 
 on a smiling winter afternoon, on those cliffs, along the 
 path which so many times had led him thither through 
 the boxwood and the hazels, he breathes out his adieus 
 and carries away all he can of the soul of things. The 
 next day he is at Caen ; a few days after, at Paris. His 
 timid nature, as trembling and shrinking as that of a 
 fiightened deer, experiences, on his arrival, a secret 
 horror. He distrusts himself, he fears mankind. 
 
 "Paris, February 1st, 1834. — My God! close my 
 eyes ; preserve me from seeing all this multitude, the 
 sight of whom gives rise in me to thoughts so bitter, so 
 discouraging. Grant that, in passing through it, I may 
 be deaf to noise, inaccessible to these impressions which 
 overwhelm me when traversing the crowd ; and to that 
 end place before mine eyes an image, a vision of things 
 that I love — a field, a vale, a moor, Le Cayla, Le Val — 
 some natural object. I will walk with looks fixed upon 
 these sweet forms, and thus I shall pass, and .feel no 
 rude jostling." 
 
 Here it is highly proper to enter somewhat into the 
 secret of this nature of Gudrin. There was in him a veri- 
 table contradiction. Through one side of him, he felt ex- 
 ternal nature passionately, distractedly ; he was capable of 
 3 
 
50 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 plunging into it with boldness, with a magnificent frenzy ; 
 of realizing in it, through his imagination, the fabulous 
 life of the ancient demi-gods. On an entirely different 
 side, he was meditative, he analyzed himself, he took 
 himself up in detail, he belittled himself at will ; he un- 
 decked his soul with a self-depreciating humility; he 
 belonged to those souls, so to speak, born Christian, 
 which have need of self-accusation, of repentance, of 
 finding outside of themselves a craving for pity, for com- 
 passion ; who have made confession early, and who will 
 always have need of confession. I have known souls 
 like these, and it has been my fortune to describe one 
 formerly, in a romance which his secret affinity with the 
 character caused Guerin to receive with favor. He also 
 was, but only in a measure, of the race of Ren^ ; in this 
 sense, that he did not think himself a superior nature ; 
 indeed, so far from that, he believed himself to be poor, 
 weak, ^^ contemptible,^^ and, in his best days, a nature 
 " rather lonely than superior : " 
 
 " To be loved as I am," murmured he to himself, " it 
 would be necessary to meet a soul that would be willing 
 to incline towards its inferior ; a strong soul, that would 
 bend the knee before the feebler, not to worship it, but 
 to serve, to console it, to protect it, as one would a sick 
 man ; a soul, in short, gifted with a sensibility as hum- 
 ble as profound, which would divest itself of pride, so 
 natural even to love, sufficiently to bury its heart in an- 
 obscure affection, which the world would in no wise com- 
 prehend ; to consecrate its life to some weak being, 
 morbid and introspective ; to be content to concentrate all 
 its rays upon a flower without brilliancy, weak and always 
 trembling ; which would bestow, indeed, perfumes whose 
 sweetness charms and penetrates, but never those which 
 
Memoir y by M, Saint e Beuve. 51 
 
 intoxicate and exalt to the happy delirium of rap- 
 ture." 
 
 His friends struggled as far as possible against this 
 dispirited temper, whose attacks he set forth to them at 
 times, its interior flow and reflow, with an exquisite 
 delicacy, with a startling distinctness. They urged him, 
 on entering this practical life, to lay out for himself a 
 plan of study, to be willing to apply in order, and to 
 concentrate his intellectual forces according to a method, 
 and upon definite subjects. They thought at one time 
 to make him accept a chair of Comparative Literature, 
 which there was some talk of founding at the college of 
 Juilly, then under the charge of MM. de Scorbias and 
 de Salinis ; but this idea was never carried out, and 
 Guerin was obliged to content himself with a temporary 
 class in the college Stanislas, and with some lessons 
 which he gave here and there. A cordial Breton friend, 
 who happened to be at Paris (M. Paul Quemper), had 
 undertaken to smooth for him the first difficulties, and 
 he succeeded. This provision made for actual necessi- 
 ties, Gudrin betook himself all the more in leisure hours 
 to the life of the soul and of fancy ; he overflowed with 
 his peculiar spirit. Retired, as in his burrow^ in a little 
 garden in Anjou street, near Pepiniere street, he trans- 
 ported himself in imagination to the grand and tender 
 spectacles which he had brought back from the land of 
 the west. In his weariness he embraced the stem of his 
 lilac, " as the sole being in the v/orld against which he 
 could lean his faltering nature, as the only thing capable 
 of supporting his embraces." But soon the air of Paris, 
 which he must needs traverse every day, reacted upon 
 this forlorn of twenty-four years. The attraction of 
 the world gradually won him ; new friendships w^ere 
 
52 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 formed, which, without destroying the old, cast them 
 insensibly into the background. Whoever had met him 
 two years afterwards, worldly, elegant, ^^fashionable" 
 even, a talker able to hold his own with brilliant talkers, 
 would never have said, to see him, that he was a worker 
 "malgre lui." There is nothing like these timid men 
 once let loose, as soon as they have felt the spur. And 
 at the same time this talent, which he persisted in doubt- 
 ing, was constantly developing and growing bold, and at 
 last he applied it to the composition of themes, to creations 
 outside of himself The artist, properly so called, mani- 
 fested itself in him. 
 
 And here let the piety of a sister, who has presided 
 over this memorial erected to a tender genius, permit us 
 one reflection. In the just tribute paid to the memory 
 of the beloved dead, nothing unjust towards the living 
 should be insinuated, and an omission may be an injus- 
 tice. The three or four years which Guerin spent in 
 Paris, and in which he lived that life of privations and 
 struggle, of study and of worldliness, of various relations, 
 are in no wise years to be despised or veiled. This 
 life is that which many among us have known, and which 
 they still lead. He lost on one side doubtless, he gained 
 on the other. He w^as in a measure unfaithful to the 
 freshness of his youthful impressions ; but, like all the 
 unfaithful who are not too much so, he expanded only 
 the better for it. Talent is a stem which takes root 
 willingly in virtue, but which often also climbs beyond 
 it and leaves it behind : it is seldom even at the moment 
 of blooming that it belongs wholly to it : it is only at the 
 breath of passion that it yields all its perfumes. 
 
 Preserving all the delicacies of his heart, his impres- 
 sions of the country and of landscape, which he revived 
 
Memoir, by M. Sainte Beuve, 53 
 
 from time to time in hurried visits, Gu^rin, divided hence- 
 forth between two worships, the God of cities and the God 
 of deserts J was the better prepared to take up art, and to 
 venture upon the composition of a work. He continued, 
 it is true, to write in his journal that he beheved himself 
 without talent ; he demonstrated it to himself in his best 
 way, in his subtle and charming pages, which pages 
 themselves proved the existence of this talent. But when 
 he ventured to say these things to his friends, intellectual 
 men, workers, of sprightly wit and animation, to d'Aure- 
 villy, to Scudo, to Amedee Rene"^ and some others, he 
 was unmercifully rallied and taunted, and, what is better, 
 he was reassured against himself ; he unconsciously bor- 
 rowed their activity and boldness. And it is thus that 
 he at last entered into his full power. The idea of the 
 Centaur came to him in consequence of several visits 
 which he had made with M. Trebutien to the Musk des 
 Afitiques. He was then reading Pausanias, and was 
 astonished at the multitude of objects described by the 
 Greek antiquary : " Greece," said he, " is like a vast 
 museum." We are witnesses of the two orders, the two 
 trains of ideas which met and reunited in him in a fruit- 
 ful alliance. 
 
 The Centaur is in no way an imitation of Ballanche ; 
 it is an original conception and peculiar to Guerin. AVe 
 have seen how he loved to diffuse himself, and, as it were, 
 to clasp Nature in the tendrils of his soul ; he was, at cer- 
 tain times, like those wandering plants whose roots float 
 
 * In the collection of poems published in 1841 by M. Amedee 
 Rene, under the title of Heures de Poesie, there is a beautiful piece 
 dedicated ^'■to the memory of Maurice de Gtierht,''^ in which his poetic 
 nature is very well characterized : he is called sick for the infinite, 
 {malade d ''infini ). 
 
54 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 on the surface of the sea at the v/ill of the waves. He has 
 expressed many a time this sense of the soul interfused, 
 and wandering with Nature ; there were days when, in 
 his love of calm, he envied " the strong and silent life 
 which holds sway under the bark of the oak ; " he 
 dreamed of some absurd metamorphosis into a tree ; 
 but this destiny of old age, this end worthy of Fhilemon 
 and Baucis, and even better suited to the wisdom of a 
 Laprade, jarred with the ardent, impetuous current of a 
 young heart. Guerin, then, had sought until now for his 
 form and had not found it : it was suddenly revealed to 
 him and personified in the figure of the Centaur. 
 These great primal organizations whose existence Lucre- 
 tian denied, and in which Guerin almost makes us be- 
 lieve ; in whom the genius of man was joined to animal 
 force still unsubdued and forming a part of it : by whom 
 Nature, hardly emerged from the waters, was overrun, 
 taken possession of, or rather set on fire, in their reck- 
 less, interminable running up and down ; seemed to him 
 worthy of a sculptor, and also of a hearer capable of 
 repeating the mystery. He supposed the last of the 
 Centaurs interrogated on the summit of a mountain, by 
 the side of his cave, and relating in his melancholy old 
 age the pleasures of his youth to a curious mortal, to 
 this diminutive of the Centaur, who is called man \ for 
 man, seen in this fabulous, grand perspective, would be 
 only a Centaur degraded and set on his feet. There is 
 nothing so powerful as this dream, occupying a few 
 pages ; nothing more finished and more classically 
 executed. 
 
 Guerin projected more ; this was only a beginning. 
 He had also done a Bacchante, which has not been 
 found, a fragment antedating I know not what prose 
 
Memoir, by M. Saint e Beuve, 55 
 
 poem whose subject was Bacchus dans VInde; he medi- 
 tated a Hermaphrodite. La Galerie des Antiques thus 
 furnished him moulds into which he was henceforth to 
 pour, and give stability, under severe or tender forms, to 
 all his sensations gathered from the heaths and strands. 
 A first phase was opening for his talent. But the artist, 
 in the presence of his ideal temple, made only the statue 
 for the threshold ; he was to fall at the outset of his 
 career. Happy in a recent marriage with a young and 
 beautiful creole, secure henceforth of a home and leisure, 
 he was attacked by a vital disorder, which made only too 
 clear the source of his habitual weakness. One under- 
 stood then the persistent lament of this rich nature ; 
 the germs of destruction and premature death which 
 were sown in the core of his organism, in the roots of 
 life, were frequently transferred to his moral nature by 
 this feeling of inexpressible discouragement and exhaus- 
 tion. This lovely young man, borne dying to the south, 
 expired in the summer of 1839, at the moment when he 
 beheld again his native sky, and when he regained in it 
 all the freshness of early tenderness and religion. The 
 guardian angels of home watched prayerfully over his pil- 
 low, and consoled his last look. He was only twenty- 
 nine years old. These two volumes, which are issued 
 to-day, will make him live ; and by a just compensation 
 for a destiny so cruelly cut off, that which was scattered, 
 which was written and noted for himself alone, which he 
 has not had time to weave and trim by the rules of art, 
 becomes his most beautiful crown, which, if I am not 
 mistaken, will never wither. 
 
 SAINTE BEUVE, 
 
 De VAcadhnie Frangaise. 
 
y O UR NA L 
 
 MAURICE DE GUERIN 
 
 (JULY, 1832— OCTOBER, 1835.) 
 
 Le Cayla, July loth, 1832. 
 EARLY three months and a half have I been 
 in the country, under the paternal roof, at 
 home (that charming English phrase com- 
 pletely summing up our chez soi)^ in the cen- 
 tre of a clear horizon. I have seen the spring — spring 
 at liberty, free, loosed from every constraint — tossing 
 flowers and verdure at its will, running like a thoughtless 
 child along our valleys and hills, putting forth sublime 
 conceptions and gracious fancies, comparing kinds, har- 
 monizing contrasts, after the manner or rather for the 
 instruction of great artists. I have seated myself in the 
 depths of the woods, on the margin of the brooks, on 
 the swell of the hills ; I have set foot again in all the 
 places where, as a child, I had rested it, rapidly and 
 with all the carelessness of that age. To-day I have 
 planted it firmly in those places ; I have paused and 
 3* 
 
58 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 dwelt upon my early footprints ; I have begun anew my 
 pilgrimage in contemplation and devotion — in the con- 
 templation of memories, and in the devotion of the soul 
 to the impressions of its first landscape. 
 
 2,0th. — There are books which need no second read- 
 ing. I have selected Ren^ for reperusal to-day — one of 
 the most disenchanted days of my life, when my heart 
 has seemed dead, a day of the dryest barrenness — to test 
 the whole power of this book upon a soul, and I have rec- 
 ognized that it is great. This reading has steeped my soul 
 in softness, as the rain of the storm. I take an infinite 
 delight in coming back to my earliest reading, the pas- 
 sionate reading of sixteen up to nineteen years of age. 
 
 l^-love to draw tears at the nearly exhausted springs of 
 
 \ my youth. 
 — ^ August ^th. — To-day I have completed my twenty- 
 second year. I have often seen, in Paris, children going 
 to the grave in their little coffins, and thus passing 
 through the mighty throng. O ! why did I not pass 
 through the world like them, buried in the coffin of my 
 innocence and in the oblivion of the life of a day ? 
 Those little angels know nothing of earth ; they grow in 
 the sky. My father has told me that, in my infancy, he 
 has often seen my soul upon my lips, ready to take wing. 
 God and paternal love held it back for the ordeal of life. 
 Gratitude and love to both ! But I cannot repress my 
 longing for the sky where I should be, and which I can 
 reach only by the oblique line of the human career. 
 
 13M. — I am weak — very weak. How many times, 
 even since grace has walked with me, have I not fallen, 
 like a child without leading-strings ! My soul is frail be- 
 yond anything that can be imagined. It is the feeling of 
 my weakness which makes me seek a shelter, and which 
 
Journal, 59 
 
 gives me strength to break with the world in order to 
 rest more surely with God. Two days of the great world 
 of Paris will put an end to all my resolutions. They 
 must needs be hidden, buried, sheltered in retirement. 
 Now among asylums open to souls in need of escape, 
 none is more favorable for me than the house of M. de 
 Lamennais, full of science and piety. 
 
 When I reflect on it, I blush for my life, which I 
 have so abused. I have blasted my humanity. Fortu- 
 nately, I had two parts in my soul ; I have plunged only 
 halfway in evil. While one-half of me was grovelling in 
 the dust, the other, inaccessible to all blemish, lofty and 
 serene, was gathering, drop by drop, that poesy which 
 shall gush forth, if God grants me the time. In that lies 
 my all. I owe everything to poesy, since there is no 
 other word to express the entirety of my thoughts. I 
 owe to it all which is still pure, elevated, and solid in my 
 soul ; I owe it all consolations I have had ; I shall owe 
 to it, perhaps, my future. 
 
 I feel that my friendship for L is strong to-day, 
 
 after having passed through the extravagances of college 
 life, and the delirium of our first sallying forth into the 
 world. It waxes grave as a season and sweet as a fruit 
 which attains its maturity. 
 
 La Chenaie, February 6t/i, 1833. — I have just fin- 
 ished reading the first volume of the " Memoirs of 
 Goethe." This book has left upon me opposite impres- 
 sions. My imagination is all astir with Margaret, with 
 Lucinda, with Frederica — Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, 
 Gellert, Gleim, Biirger, that burst of German poetry, 
 which rises so fair, so national, toward the middle of the 
 eighteenth century ; all that fermentation of thought in 
 the German brain interests profoundly, especially in face 
 
 tririVBEsiTy' 
 
6o Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 of the actual epoch, so fruitful and so glorious for Ger- 
 many. But a bitter thought occurs in following the de- 
 tails of education, and the march of the intellectual de- 
 velopment of the young, such as it is understood in this 
 country ; and the bitterness springs from a comparison 
 with French education. I have spent ten years in the 
 colleges, and I have come out, bringing, together with 
 some scraps of Latin and Greek, an enormous mass of 
 weariness. That is about the result of all college educa- 
 tion in France. They put into the hands of young men 
 the ancient authors ; that is well. But do they teach 
 them to know, to appreciate antiquity ? Have they ever 
 developed for them the relations of those magnificent 
 literatures with the Nature, with the religious dogmas, the 
 systems of philosophy, the fine arts, the civilizations ot 
 the ancient nations ? Has their intelligence ever been 
 led by those beautiful links which bind all parts of the 
 civilization of a people, and make of it a superb whole, 
 all whose details touch, reflect, and mutually explain 
 each other ? What professor, reading Homer or Virgil 
 to his pupils, has developed the poetry of the Iliad or 
 the ^neid by the poetry of Nature under the sky of 
 Greece or Italy ? Who has dreamed of annotating re- 
 ciprocally the poets by the philosophers, the philoso- 
 phers by the poets, the latter by the artists, Plato by 
 Homer, Homer by Phidias ? They isolate these great 
 geniuses, they disjoint a literature, and they fling you its 
 scattered limbs, without taking the trouble to tell you 
 what place they occupy, what relations they mutually 
 sustain in the great organization whence they have been 
 detached. Children take a special delight in cutting out 
 the pictures which fall into their hands ; they separate 
 with great skill the figures one from the other ; their 
 
Journal, 6i 
 
 scissors follow exactly all their outlines, and the group 
 thus divided is portioned out among the little company, 
 because each one wants an image. The labor of our 
 professors bears no slight resemblance to that of the chil- 
 dren ; and an author, thus cut off from his surroundings, 
 is as difficult to understand as the figure cut out by the 
 children and separated from the grouping and the back- 
 ground of the picture. After that, need we be aston- 
 ished that the studies are so empty, so insufficient ? 
 What can remain from a long devotion to the dead let- 
 ter, stripped, as it were, of meaning, except disgust, and 
 an almost entire hatred of study ? In Germany, on the 
 contrary, a broad philosophy presides over literary stud- 
 ies, and sheds over the earliest labors of youth that grace 
 which so sweetly cherishes and develops the love of 
 science. 
 
 Come, courage ! I am so accustomed to farewells, 
 separations ! Ah ! nevertheless, that one is too severe. 
 No, it is not too severe, since there is no evil, however 
 great, which does not call forth in the soul an equal 
 faculty of endurance. I shall endure, but shall keep my 
 word. 
 
 March 2,d. — I commenced to write in this blank book 
 the tenth of July, 1832, and I have come back to it only 
 at long intervals. These eight months have passed in 
 the crudest sufferings of soul. I have written little, be- 
 cause my powers have been nearly crushed. If the mal- 
 ady had left my intellect a little liberty, I should have 
 gathered some very curious observations upon moral suf- 
 fering ', but I was bewildered with anguish. I think 
 spring will do me great good. As the sun ranges higher 
 and vital heat pervades nature, the sharpness of grief 
 loses its energy ; I feel its bonds relax, and my soul. 
 
6i Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 long compressed and almost strangled, expands in pro- 
 portion and opens to breathe. 
 
 The hours of to-day have enchanted me. The sun, 
 for the first time in many days, has shown himself in all 
 his radiant beauty. He has unfolded the buds of the 
 leaves and flowers, and awakened in my bosom a thou- 
 sand tender thoughts. The clouds resume their light 
 and graceful shapes, and sketch the blue with charming 
 fancies. The woods have not yet their leaves, but they 
 take on I know not what spirited and joyful air, which 
 gives them an entirely new face. Everything is prepar- 
 ing for the great holiday of Nature. 
 
 4th. — I see laborers digging in the garden. These 
 poor people thus expend their whole life to gain where- 
 with to eat their bread from day to day — their dry and 
 black bread. What a mystery is that of all these exist- 
 ences, so rude and lowly ! — and they are almost the 
 whole of the human race. A day will come when all 
 these drudges of society will show their blackened and 
 callous hands, seamed with grasping the handles of their 
 tools, and will say, " Thou, Lord, who hast said, Blessed 
 are the poor and lowly, behold us ! " 
 
 " To you, good God, we make our last appeal ! " 
 
 6th. — filie * and I have had a long interview. Always 
 full of enthusiasm for travels, we have made an excur- 
 sion to America ; we have ascended the great rivers, 
 sailed over the lakes, wandered through the forests in 
 company with Natty Bumpo and Cooper's other heroes. 
 
 Delightful reminiscences ! Back to Europe. Pro- 
 digious fermentation of society. The infinity of thought 
 
 * 3lllie de Kertanguy died 1846. 
 
Journal, (i^ 
 
 which pervades human intelligence, all intelligences, be- 
 ginning with the highest angelic powers down to our- 
 selves, and perhaps below us — who knows ? A sea of 
 thought heaving before God. What is a human intelli- 
 gence taken apart from this immensity j what is this im- 
 mensity itself compared with the thought eternal, God ? 
 Bewilderment ! He is a man who has pondered all 
 these things, who has sounded the depths of humility, 
 and whose soul is so strong that he writes, not for this 
 world's fame, but for the world's good, without flinching 
 or failing. Mysterious struggles of a genius, a mission- 
 ary, a martyr ! God has, in some sort, revealed to him 
 the profoundest depths of society, and all the secrets of 
 the evil which preys upon it All this he has seen ; 
 for a time he has been uncertain how to lay hold of this 
 social malady, and he has been a prey to great sadness, 
 to a sort of anguish. At last he found what he sought, 
 and joy returned to him. He accomplished his great 
 mission. O ! whoever should know the rude combats 
 of his soul, could not have sufficient admiration for such 
 devotion, for the inner forces of that man are incessantly 
 struggling with thoughts which would crush powers less 
 strong than his ; but he has received the apostleship, 
 like St. Paul, and he preaches a gospel. " Nam si evan- 
 gelizavero, non est mihi gloria ; necessitas enim mihi 
 incumbit ; vag enim mihi est, si non evangelizavero." 
 
 Hence we arrived at the necessity, the indispensable 
 law which binds each one to fulfil his social mission, 
 however narrow, however inconsiderable it may be. We 
 owe all to the general good ; not only the sacrifice of our 
 passions, but also the sacrifice of our innocent tastes, of 
 our plans of individual happiness, if this happiness con- 
 sist in being idle and useless to our kind. We did cast 
 
64 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 a glance at that life, so sweet, so peaceable, which nestles 
 in the bosom of the family ; but that, too, was a glance 
 of sacrifice, resolved as we are to choose our place where 
 we can do the most good. 
 
 This interview has restored my powers, so feeble, so 
 tottering. My heart is filled with an unknown sweet- 
 ness, and my soul has taken possession of herself, like a 
 sick man, who, having drunk a healing potion, sinks into 
 his bed, expressing satisfaction, which is, in truth, naught 
 but the expression of hope. 
 
 Zth. — A snowy day. A southeast wind curls the 
 snow in eddies, in great whirls of a dazzling whiteness. 
 It melts as it falls. Here we are transported, as it were, 
 into the heart of winter, after a few spring smiles. The 
 v/ind is cold enough ; the little singing-birds, new- 
 comers, shiver, and the flowers, too. The chinks of the 
 partitions and the sashes wail as in January ; and I, in 
 my poor wrapper, shrink into myself, like Nature. 
 
 ^th. — More snow, hail, blasts, cold. Poor Brittany ! 
 thou sorely needest a little verdure to brighten thy som- 
 bre face. O ! doff quickly, then, thy hooded winter 
 cloak, and let me see thee take thy light garment of 
 spring, tissue of leaves and of flowers. When shall I 
 see the skirts of thy robe fluttering at the will of the 
 winds ? — Read Homer, and the exploits of the Norman 
 heroes in Italy and Sicily. Met and shook hands with 
 Achilles, Diomed, Ulysses, Robert Guiscard, Roger. 
 
 1.0th. — 
 
 ^ovTO vx) KoX yepas olhv oi<rvpo7cn fiporoiffoi 
 Keipacr^ai re K6fn]v^ ^aX4eiv r airh Sdxpv irapeiuy. 
 
 Ocfyss., iv. 
 
 iiZ/z. — It has snowed all night. My shutters, poorly 
 fastened, allowed me glimpses, as soon as I rose, of that 
 
JournaL 65 
 
 great sheet of white which has been silently spread over 
 the fields. The black trunks of the trees rise like col- 
 umns of ebony from the ivory-paved court of a temple ; 
 this severe and sharp contrast, and a certain dejected 
 manner in the woods, make one very sad. Naught is 
 heard ; not a living thing, save a few sparrows who take 
 refuge, peeping as they go, in the fir-trees that stretch 
 their long arms laden with snow. The interior of these 
 bushy trees is impervious to the frosts ; it is a shelter 
 prepared by Providence. The little birds know it well. 
 
 I have visited our primroses ; each was bearing its 
 little burden of snow, and bending its head under the 
 weight. These pretty flowers, so richly colored, present- 
 ed a charming effect under their white hoods, I saw 
 whole tufts of them covered over with a single block of 
 snow ; all these laughing flowers thus veiled, and lean- 
 ing the one against the other, seemed like a group of 
 young girls overtaken by a shower and getting to shelter 
 under a white apron. 
 
 I was expecting a letter this evening ; I did not re- 
 ceive it, but a friend arrived. It would be very curious 
 to note whether, in the most trifling disappointments of 
 life. Providence does not contrive for us compensations, 
 which our ill-humor and injustice prevent our appreci- 
 ating. 
 
 12th. — " Gustans gustavi in summitate virgae, quae 
 erat in manu mea, paululum mellis, et ecce morior " — 
 Lib. Reg., cap. XIV. 
 
 i^th. — We live the interior life too little ; we scarcely 
 live it at all. What has become of that inward eye 
 which God has given us to keep unceasing watch over 
 our soul, to be the witness of the mysterious workings of 
 thought, the ineffable motion of life in the tabernacle of 
 
66 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 humanity ? It is closed, it slumbers ; and we open wide 
 our earthly eyes, and yet understand nothing in nature, 
 not availing ourselves of that sense which would reveal it 
 to us, reflected in the divine mirror of the spirit. There 
 is no contact between ourselves and Nature ; we have 
 knowledge of the exterior form alone, and none at all 
 of the meaning of the hidden language, of beauty con- 
 sidered as eternal and partaking of God — things which 
 would all be limpidly outlined and mirrored in a soul en- 
 dowed with the marvellous introspective faculty. O ! this 
 contact between nature and the soul would engender an 
 unspeakable delight, a prodigious love of Heaven and 
 God. 
 
 To descend into the soul of man, is to cause Nature 
 to descend into his soul. 
 
 i6th. — I find in ^^ L^ Europe Litteraire" some remark- 
 able ideas. It is there said that the zones of thought 
 grow less distinct each day; that the mighty intellects 
 scattered over the whole globe begin to comprehend each 
 other ; that everything advances towards a vast republic 
 of human thought. And again : that the ancients have 
 seized wonderfully well upon the general traits of the 
 human soul and of Nature ; that they fashioned from them 
 a poetry, external, plastic, visible ; but that the epoch of 
 an introspective, profound, analytical poetry has arrived. 
 These thoughts are not altogether new, and have been 
 for some time current in the world j but it is good to ac- 
 tualize as much as possible the great movement which is 
 at work, and to give it shape. 
 
 igfh. — Took a walk in the forest of Coetquen. Hap- 
 pened upon a place remarkable for its wildness ; the 
 road descends with a sudden pitch into a little ravine 
 where flows a little brook over a slaty bed, which gives 
 
Journal, 67 
 
 its waters a blackish hue, disagreeable at first, but which 
 ceases to be so when you have noted its harmony with 
 the black trunks of the old oaks, the sombre verdure of 
 the ivies, and its contrast with the white and glossy limbs 
 of the birches. A strong north wind swept through the 
 forest, and caused it to utter deep roarings. The trees, 
 under the buffets of the wind, struggled like madmen. 
 Through the branches we saw the clouds flying rapidly 
 in black and grotesque masses, and seeming lightly to 
 graze the tops of the trees. This great gloomy, floating 
 veil showed rents here and there, through which glided a 
 ray of sunshine which fell like a flash of lightning into 
 the bosom of the forest. These sudden passages of 
 light gave to the majestic depths of shade a haggard and 
 weird aspect, like a smile on the lips of the dead. 
 
 20th. — The winter is departing with a smile ; it bids 
 adieu with a brilliant sun shining in a sky pure and 
 smooth as a Venice-glass. Another step of time accom- 
 plished. Oh ! why can it not, like the coursers of the 
 immortals, with four bounds reach the limits of its last- 
 ing ! 
 
 Finished reading the first volume of " The History of 
 the Italian Republics." It is a grand spectacle to see 
 Liberty emerging from the wreck and rubbish of the Ro- 
 man Empire and taking her seat, cross in hand, on the 
 shores of the seas, at Venice, Genoa and Pisa. At first 
 she showed herself at Amalfi, at Naples, at Gaeta ; but 
 the kings hunted her away. Then she bade a long fare- 
 well to Southern Italy, and ever skirting the sea, settled 
 in the North. M. Sismonde Sismondi has failed to ap- 
 preciate the fine drama of Italian liberty ; he has not 
 grasped the character of the highest personage, the true 
 hero of that grand scene, the Pope. Actors to whom be- 
 
68 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 long the leading parts, he casts almost among the super- 
 numeraries. He represents sovereign pontiffs like vulgar 
 self-seekers, quarrelsome barons, the tiara on their heads 
 and the cross in their hands. His work has in it this im- 
 mense void, which makes itself felt on every page. To 
 the Countess Matilda, too, he gives extremely poor pay- 
 ment for her beautiful devotion to the cause of the popes, 
 and consequently the cause of Italian liberty. 
 
 2isf. — A source of pleasure drained. I have read 
 the last page of " Studies of Nature." It is one of those 
 books we wish would never end. There is little to be 
 gained from it for science, but much for poetry, for the 
 elevation of the soul, and the contemplation of Nature. 
 This book sets free and enlightens a faculty which we all 
 have, however veiled,,, vague, and almost totally reft of 
 energy,T— the faculty which gathers the beauty of Nature, 
 and hands it over to the soul, which spiritualizes it, har- 
 monizes it, combines it with ideal beauty, and thus en- 
 larges its sphere of love and adoration. 
 
 My God ! why do we complain of our isolation ? I 
 was long possessed by this foolish idea. 
 
 At that time I was living on a wrong principle ; I had 
 established false relations between the physical world 
 and my soul, and I suffered much, for Nature denied me 
 her treasures of joy, and spurned my friendship, on ac- 
 count of these false relations. I was disconsolate in the 
 midst of a profound solitude, the world seemed to me 
 worse than a desert and wholly barren island in the bosom 
 of a wild ocean. The silence was frightful. Folly ! pure | 
 folly ! There is no isolation for the man who knows how 
 to take his place in the universal harmony, and to open 
 his soul to all the impressions of that harmony. Then 
 one comes to have almost a physical consciousness that 
 
Journal, 69 
 
 
 we live from God and in God \ the spirit drinks, to reple- 
 tion, of this universal life j it swims in it, like a fish in 
 water. 
 
 Let us abjure the worship of idols, let us turn our 
 backs on all the deities of art, decked with paint and false 
 finery, on all these images, with mouths that speak not. 
 Let us adore Nature, frank, ingenuous, and in no respect 
 exclusive. Great God ! how can men make poetry in 
 face of the broad poem of the universe ? Your poetry ! 
 the Lord has made it for you ; it is the created world. 
 Think you, you hold deeper meanings than he ? 
 
 22d. — A profitless day ; the letter which I received 
 yesterday evening has completely paralyzed me. It is 
 not very severe, and full of good advice. But, unfortu- 
 nately, I am so constituted that the best remedies fail of 
 effect upon me ; nay, what is much more strange, often 
 make me worse. Thus this letter, in probing my most 
 sensitive wounds in order to heal them, has thrilled in me 
 the chord of all my past sufferings. All my bitter recol- 
 lections have sprung into waking life at a bound j in a 
 few hours I have resumed the miseries of ten years, taken 
 them up not in thought merely, but with a deep and ac- 
 tual feeling of them. As long as those sad topics shall 
 remain stamped on my memory, my new life will be feeble 
 and languid. A trifle suffices to plunge me anew into 
 these memories, and brings on paroxysms that exhaust 
 and agonize me. 
 
 It is true that this past of which I speak is yet so 
 near that it throws over me the full length of its shadow. 
 As I recede from it, I trust its present power will grow 
 weaker, and that at last I shall find myself free from its 
 impressions. Nevertheless, I persist in beHeving that 
 disease in me is so organic, and the wreck so complete, 
 
70 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 that I shall never be wholly restored. That apprehensive; 
 uneasy, analyzing trait of my character is too active ever] 
 to leave me any repose. Mayhap through love ,of God 
 shall I succeed one day in robbing it of a portion of its 
 power. If I alone suffered, it were well ; but those that 
 I love, and who are good enough to love me, suffer also. 
 I cause them grief, and that is my greatest unhappiness. 
 
 Intellectually I make very slow advances. I appre- 
 hend a thousand things, but this is a vexation rather than 
 a progress. I read slowly, and am never free from dis- 
 quieting preoccupations. Even the ravishing contempla- 
 tion of Nature cannot lull these thoughts that, like insects, 
 buzz incessantly about my soul. I am dragging through 
 the study of the languages, of which, however, I am fond. 
 I am backward in everything, and yet I am conscious of 
 something which sharply spurs me on. 
 
 2^th. — ^ came to me all excitement, with tears in 
 
 his eyes. " What is the matter ? " " M. Fell has frighten- 
 ed me." " How ? " " He was sitting behind the chapel, 
 under the two Scotch firs ; he took his stick, and drew 
 upon the sward a tomb, and said to me : * 'Tis there I 
 wish to lie ; but let there be no monumental stone — a 
 simple mound of turf. O ! how happy I shall be there ! ' 
 I thought that he felt ill, that he foresaw his end approach- 
 ing. Besides, it is not the first time that he has been 
 disturbed by presentiments. He told us, when he set out 
 for Rome : * I do not expect to see you again ; accom- 
 plish the good that I have been unable to do.' He longs 
 to die. This world is such a dismal place for a thorough- 
 ly Christian soul, and above all for a Christian soul like 
 his." 
 
 26th. — A young man from Dauphind, Henry Guiller- 
 mard by name, sends me some verses with reference to 
 
Journal. 7 1 
 
 certain stanzas on Poland, inserted m. V Avenir eighteen 
 months ago. Rather an amusing incident to see his self- 
 love start up after so long a time, and for such a trifle ! 
 
 2 "jth. — I jog along pretty well in my new path. Right 
 weary do I become at times ; but God soon restores my 
 courage, doubtless because I have placed more reliance 
 on His infinite goodness. My work grows more certain 
 and more tranquil ; ideas come into my head without 
 confusion or tumult, calmly and in fair array. 
 
 I take great delight in combining and blending the 
 study of ancient and modern Art. These two studies, 
 joined hand in hand, lend each other marvellous charms ; 
 and this reminds me of a picture where Homer is seen 
 yielding his hand to the guidance of a lovely child. 
 
 28//Z. — As often as we allow ourselves to penetrate to 
 Nature, our soul opens to the most touching impressions. 
 There is something in Nature, whether she decks herself 
 in smiles during the bright days, or becomes, as in 
 autumn and winter, pale, gray, cold and tearful, which 
 stirs not only the surface of the spirit, but even its most 
 secret recesses, and awakens a thousand memories which 
 have, apparently, no connection with the external aspects, 
 but which, without doubt, sustain a relation with the soul 
 of Nature by sympathies to us unknown. This marvel- 
 lous power I have experienced to-day, stretched in a 
 grove of beeches, and breathing the warm air of spring. 
 
 29//Z. — Yesterday we extended our walk farther than 
 usual ; M. Gerbet, Mermet and I reconnoitered toward 
 the north, as far as the heights of St. Helen. This is a 
 sort of belvidere, v/hence the view extends over a vast 
 horizon, southward and eastward, sombre and monot- 
 onous. Northward rise the shores of the ocean, describ- 
 ing a long line of blue. A little to the northeast — thanks 
 
72 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 to a break in the hills — we had a glimpse of the bay of 
 Cancale. Its waters, struck by the sunlight, glistened 
 brightly in a luminous strip, enabling us to distinguish 
 them from the bluish coast of Normandy. Yonder, west- 
 ward, we could see Dinant with its lofty spires, half veil- 
 ed in the haze that hangs over cities ; in the distance, 
 plains. In the same direction stood out against a dark 
 background the white country houses, always in company 
 with a clump of firs, which seemed like a huge black 
 giant standing guard for the protection of the hearthstone. 
 The pointed belfries, rising at intervals like the tow- 
 ers on an immense rampart, shot up around the entire 
 horizon. I am delighted with this excursion for having 
 opened to me this grand panorama, but above all for 
 having given me a glimpse of the ocean. 
 
 " O ! c'est im beart spectacle h ravir la pensee,^'' 
 
 ^^^^^ this vast circulation of life carried on in the ample bosom 
 of Nature ; life which springs from an invisible fountain, 
 
 •^j^ and swells the veins of this universe. Obeying its law of 
 
 ascension, it mounts, ever purifying and ennobling itself, 
 from kingdom to kingdom, to pulsate at last in the heart 
 
 "^Y^ of man, the centre, where from every quarter its thousand 
 
 currents meet. There it is brought under the touch of 
 Divinity ; there, as upon the altar burning with incense, 
 
 V it exhales itself, with sacrificial mystery, in the bosom 
 
 Nv of God. Methinks there should be profound and mar- 
 
 vellous things to be said upon the sacrifice of Nature 
 in the heart of man, and the eucharistic offering made in 
 that same heart. The simultaneousness of these two 
 sacrifices, and the absorption of the one in the other on 
 the same altar, that rendezvous in humanity, of God, and 
 
Journal. 73 
 
 all created things, should open to view, it seems to me, 
 grand heights and depths, sublimitas et profundum. 
 
 3 \st, — The love which speaks, sings, wails in one part 
 of creation, reveals itself in the other half under the form 
 of flowers. All this efflorescence, so rich in form, in 
 color, and in perfume, with which the fields are resplen- 
 dent, is the expression of love ; it is love itself which 
 celebrates its sweet mysteries in the bosom of each flower. 
 The blooming bough, the bird which alights thereon to 
 sing or to build its nest, the man who regards both 
 branch and bird, are all animated by the same principle 
 in different degrees of perfection. I read in Herder that 
 the flowers perish immediately after fructification ; that 
 the birds lose their song, their blitheness, and some of 
 them the brilliant colors of their plumage after the sea- 
 son of nests, and that man, after the period of passions, 
 declines rapidly towards old age. There is food for 
 meditation in this law of decay so intimately connected 
 with the law of love and reproduction. 
 
 April 2d. — The clouds have dropped rain all day 
 long. Sometimes it fell in violent showers, sometimes 
 in fine mist, lightly rustling. The blackbirds, the hedge- 
 sparrows, all the singing-birds whistle, chirp, and warble, 
 notwithstanding. The clouds leave, at times, large clear 
 spaces in the sky through which the sun pours floods of 
 light. Then the bordering clouds catch the illumina- 
 tion j rank on rank they fly afar, but with tints fading 
 and more indistinct as they recede, until the rays die 
 away and are absorbed in an enormous mass which hangs 
 motionless on the confines of the south-eastern horizon, 
 brightly tipping its salient points, and leaving in shadow 
 its irregular depressions. 
 
 a^th. — A very rainy morning. Spring takes an ugly 
 4 
 
74 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 turn. Toward one o'clock, the heavens uncurtained, 
 and we had a few moments of clear sky and penetrating 
 heat. Now the clouds begin again to encroach. I have 
 seen their grizzly heads rising on the horizon j in less than 
 no time we shall have lost the blue. They are fleeing to- 
 ward the east. I rather like this scudding of the clouds ; 
 some seem to be eyeing each other and exchanging a 
 challenge to a race. 
 
 $th. — A beautiful day as one could wish. Some 
 clouds, but only as many as are needed to give pictur- 
 esqueness to the sky. They assume more and more their 
 summer forms. Their scattered groups repose motionless 
 under the sun, like flocks of sheep in the pastures, during 
 the heat of the day. I have seen a swallow, and I have 
 heard the bees humming over the flowers. Seating my- 
 self in the sun, in order that I may be saturated to the 
 marrow with divine Spring, I have experienced some 
 of the impressions of my childhood ; for a moment, I 
 have regarded the sky with its clouds, the earth with its 
 forests, its songs, its murmurings, as I did then. This 
 renewing of the first aspect of things, of the expression 
 which our first thoughts put upon them is, to my thinking, 
 one of the sweetest influences of childhood on the current 
 of life. 
 
 My God ! what is my soul about to be thus taken up 
 with such evanescent pleasures, on Good Friday, that day 
 full of the thought of Thy death and of our redemption ! 
 There is in me I know not what reprehensible spirit 
 which excites great discontent, and drives me as it were 
 to rebel against all holy offices and the collectedness of 
 soul which are the due preparation for the great solem- 
 nities of our faith. We have been in special seclusion 
 for two days, and I have done nothing but grow weary, 
 
Journal, 
 
 fretted with I know not what thoughts, and even becom- 
 ing irritated with the customs of the retreat. Oh ! how 
 well I recognize here the old leaven of which I have not 
 yet purged my soul ! 
 
 \oth. — We have left the great festival three days be- 
 hind. One less anniversary of the death and resurrec- 
 tion of our Saviour ! Every year is marked with its 
 solemn festivals. When will come at last the festival 
 eternal ? I have witnessed something very touching j 
 Frangois brought us one of his friends whom he had con- 
 verted. This neophyte has entered upon the exercises 
 of the retreat, and Easter-day he communed with us. 
 Francois was in the seventh heaven. He took great 
 credit to himself for that. FranQois is quite young ; he 
 is hardly twenty. M. de La M is thirty, and is mar- 
 ried. There is something very touching and unaffected 
 
 on the part of M. de La M in thus allowing himself 
 
 to be led to God by a very young man ; and this 
 youthful friendship which makes an apostle of Frangois 
 is no less beautiful and touching. They are country 
 neighbors, often labor together and write charming verses 
 to each other upon the events of their domestic or friend- 
 ly intercourse. 
 
 I have read Lucrezia Borgia with the liveliest delight. 
 Everything that comes from Hugo, it is needless to say, is 
 remarkable, and bears his strong impress. There is in 
 the quality of his genius something so surprising, so daz- 
 zling, so bewildering, that after reading his work, be it 
 drama, ode, or romance, one is left all amazed, the soul 
 profoundly stirred, and the mind, to say the least, intense- 
 ly excited. All his compositions set some of the inner- 
 most fibres of our humanity vibrating, or penetrate into 
 some depth. His Lucrezia Borgia shows great progress. 
 
76 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 Hugo is right when he says, in the preface, that this 
 drama will be the principal epoch in his literary career. 
 Indeed, it seems to me that his genius is, as it were, in- 
 carnated in this work. I find there in the highest degree 
 of exaltation the two kinds of genius which rule in his 
 soul : one ardent, bounding, excessive in its imi^etuosity, 
 delighting in strange, frightful things, running after peri- 
 lous and fanciful adventures in which blood will be shed, 
 and encounters to make the hair stand on end ; fatalist, 
 because his vagaries carry him too high among the ideals 
 of humanity without bringing him near enough to God ; 
 the other, calm, pleasant, full of tenderness, though not 
 sentimental ; seizing upon that in man which is purest, 
 most exalted, most fruitful in virtue and gentleness. The 
 Odes et Ballades^ Notre Da?ne de Paris, Hernani, Han 
 d'Islande, Les Feuilles d^Automne, are all stamped with 
 this two-fold impress. These contrasts of his soul tend 
 more and more to declare themselves, to place them- 
 selves more and more in opposition. He has made a 
 statement of them in the notice of his new drama, and in 
 the drama itself, has embodied them in a sublime creation. 
 This dualism of his will work out some magnificent 
 things ; but he will do great injury if he wishes to make 
 others adopt it as well as himself. 
 
 i$th. — At last I have seen the ocean. C ^ and I 
 
 set out on Thursday, at one o'clock, with fine weather 
 and a fresh breeze. We had seven leagues to go ; but we 
 were so enchanted to find ourselves marching towards the 
 sea, that we took little thought of the length of the way. 
 C uttered a cry of joy ; this pedestrian trip remind- 
 ed him of his journey to the South of Spain and Switzer- 
 
 * M. Edmond de Cazales, son of the celebrated orator of I'Assem- 
 blee Constitucntc. 
 
Journal, 77 
 
 land, which he made on foot. He has a great fancy for 
 this way of travelling. " In this humble equipage," said 
 he to me, " the traveller mingles with the people, he goes 
 into the inns to refresh himself or to rest, he sleeps in 
 cottages, he accosts travellers like himself; these chance 
 meetings on the dusty highway, these men who go each 
 whither God leads him, sometimes bring about touching 
 confidences." Then he talked with enthusiasm of the 
 beautiful lakes and the grand mountains. At Cha- 
 teauneuf, a charming little village, a fine view unfolded to 
 us: on one side, to the north-west, were tiers of hills 
 heavily wooded, each crowned with its white house, and, 
 when the hills failed, La Ranee flowed broadly on, daz- 
 zling as a mirror in the sunlight j on the other side, to 
 the east, a well-cultivated plain extended in full view till 
 it lost itself in the horizon. Patches of early verdure 
 gleamed here and there, and by the fresh and ruddy color 
 of the woods, one could see that the face of Nature was 
 flushing with life and heat, and that she was ready to 
 burst into bloom. This grand spectacle, embellished by 
 all the enchantment of the sunlight, turned our conversa- 
 tion upon the study and worship of Nature. I was de- 
 lighted to hear C express exactly what I have felt in 
 
 the bottom of my soul on this subject. He added : " This 
 great mystery of the goodness of God which is manifest^^ 
 ed to all, good and evil alike, by this display of the | 
 beauty and richness of Nature, is, to my thinking, an idea I 
 full of hope for the destiny of men in the other life." I 
 The thought of death which rose before us in the light of \ 
 these reflections seemed so sweet and consoling that we 
 fairly longed to die. We had stripped the face of Death 
 of that hideous mask with which the terror of evil con- 
 sciences has invested it, and he smiled upon us. Would it 
 
7 8 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 not be the same with all, if they were stirred by a particle of 
 love for heavenly things, or even by a little curiosity ? 
 Again he said to me : "I have been loaded with the 
 greatest blessings ; I have abused them shamefully, and yet 
 I have such trust in God that I feel sure of my salvation." 
 Our conversation travelled far on this line of thought. 
 Then we fell to relating our inner life, our conflicts, our 
 way of meeting life, etc. Little by little the conversation 
 
 wandered to the poets, and love. C knows a great 
 
 deal about Lamartine ; he has the happiness to be his 
 friend. He is skilled in the lore of love, he has loved 
 long and much, and he loves still, but his enchantment 
 begins to fade. Lamartine, Hugo, Nodier, and the rest 
 brought us to the gates of Saint-Malo, and lulled the 
 cruel pain in my feet cramped and tortured in tight boots. 
 A little after sunset wc found ourselves in sight of the 
 town. It appeared to us suddenly at the turn of a street 
 in Saint-Servan. AVhat struck me, at first, was a row of 
 vessels whose enormous hulls presented a black front 
 and shapes hardly discernible in the shadow, but whose 
 masts and rigging, rising into the sky, seemed, as it were, 
 to embroider the evening light. Behind these ships we 
 perceived a black mass surrounded with ramparts. It 
 was Saint-Malo, a veritable nest for sea-birds ; and further 
 on, where we could distinguish nothing, arose a deep, 
 monotonous voice ; it was the ocean. We came into the 
 town along the shore, thanks to the low tide ; we took lodg- 
 ings at L^ Hotel de France^ from which one has a view of 
 the sea, and, for the first time in my life, I fell asleep 
 with the ocean two hundred yards from my bed, and un- 
 der the spell of its marvellous grandeur. The next day, 
 straight to the sea. The tide was beginning to rise : we 
 had time, however, to make the tour on foot of the rock 
 
Journal, 79 
 
 of Saint-Malo. What I experienced, as I cast my eyes 
 over this infinite expanse, it would be difficult to ex- 
 press. The soul is not equal to this spectacle ; it shrinks 
 before this vast phenomenon and knows no longer 
 whither it goes. I remember, however, that I thought 
 first of God, then of the deluge, of Columbus, of conti- 
 nents beyond the abyss, of shipwrecks, of sea-fights, of 
 Byron, of Rene, who embarked at Saint-Malo, and who, 
 borne away on the same waves that I was contemplating, 
 fixed his eyes on the grated window where gleamed the 
 lamp of the nun. For the rest, this first visit has been 
 so short, and the impression it has left so startling and 
 unmeasured, that no assured and settled conclusions 
 have stayed in my soul. After three hours, which van- 
 ished like a moment, we started on a little craft which 
 goes up the Ranee as far as Dinan, and finished our 
 journey on foot, with somewhat jaded bodies, but with 
 happy hearts. 
 
 22d. — I have stumbled sadly, and my life has great trou- 
 ble in recovering from the fall. All work is impossible with 
 this sort of agitation. Everything is embittered with such 
 a taste of gall in the mouth. Am I to blame ? Some- 
 what so, perhaps. I ought not to feel these things so 
 keenly ; but it must also be confessed that, without 
 annihilating one's soul, without having compressed, cramp- 
 ed, wrung it in a way to leave in it no drop of the love of 
 independence, it is difficult to stifle this cry of liberty, or of 
 pride, call it by what name you will. This little adventure 
 augurs very ill for my new life ; if so trifling an experience 
 has put to flight my patience and all my good resolutions, 
 I have not much to hope from my resignation in the 
 future. Disenchantment has again taken hold of me ; all 
 that smiled upon me yesterday makes faces at me to-day ; 
 
8o Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 all that was white is black, all that was clear is troubled ; 
 my soul 
 
 " N''est pltcs qu'une onde obscure ou le sable a montiy 
 
 It is a misfortune to be thus constituted. My happi- 
 ness must be pure and rounded at every point ; the least 
 blemish disfigures it in my eyes, a black cloud in the 
 sky spoils the whole heavens for me. It is folly, and 
 the most unwise of all follies, for there is no such 
 happiness in this world j but it seems to be my lot to 
 be as poorly favored with illusions as with realities. 
 Fiat ! fiat ! 
 
 23^. — The awakening of vegetation is prodigiously 
 slow. I am almost out of humor with Nature, who seems 
 to take pleasure in exhausting our patience. The larches, 
 the birches, two lilac-trees that we have in the garden, 
 the rose-bushes and the hedges of hawthorn, show the 
 least bit of green ; everything else is gloomy, and sleeps 
 almost as in winter, save a few beeches which, more 
 spring-like than their brothers, begin to flush with color 
 against the dark mass of the grove by the pond. At any 
 rate, the birds are all come ; the nightingales sing day 
 and night, the sun shines merrily, the winged insects hum 
 and gambol in the air ; everywhere is life and joy, except 
 with me. I know not by what capricious contrast life 
 has been more burdensome in these last few days than in 
 the winter, when I was not a little troubled. I seem to 
 myself like a dead tree in the midst of the green, green 
 woods. 
 
 24//^. — Finished reading the Fhysiologie vegetale, by 
 Candolle, three volumes octavo. The first treats of the nur- 
 ture, the second of the reproduction of plants, the third 
 of the influence of external agents. In spite of the 
 
Journal, 8 1 
 
 chemistry which is a principal feature in this work, es- 
 pecially in the first volume, and of which I do not under- 
 stand a word, I have found a lively pleasure in reading 
 it. Even before I had taken a half step in it, an entirely 
 new world, a little vague to be sure, opened before me ; 
 but, however that maybe, it is no small happiness to open up 
 a new perspective in the contemplation of this world, and 
 to get glimpses of the life and beauty of Nature. An in- 
 finite number of details have escaped me, but the im- 
 pression which remains is precious. It has increased for 
 me the charm in observing natural objects, and has turn- 
 ed my feet towards an inexhaustible source of consola- 
 tions and of poetry. Oh ! what must be the happiness 
 of Heaven, since the slightest view of the order 
 and vital energy of our diminutive globe delights us so 
 profoundly ! From another point of view, pain and vexa- 
 tion of soul are increased. We are always running our 
 heads against phenomena we do not comprehend — vulgar 
 phenomena, so common as to make the shock so much 
 the more cruel. But we must take patience in view of 
 the future, and accustom our souls to be satisfied with 
 litde. 
 
 2^th, — It has just been raining. Nature is fresh, 
 radiant ; the earth seems to taste with delight the water 
 which brings it life. One would say that the birds' throats 
 are also refreshed by this rain ; their song is purer, more 
 gushing, more piercing, and vibrates wonderfully in the 
 air now become exquisitely sonorous and echoing. The 
 nightingale, the bullfinches, the blackbirds, the thrushes, 
 the orioles, the finches, the wrens, all sing and rejoice. 
 A goose, screaming like a trumpet, adds to the charm 
 by contrast. The motionless trees seem to listen to all 
 these sounds. Innumerable apple-trees in flower look 
 4^ 
 
82 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 from a distance like balls of snow ; the cherry-trees, also 
 in white, rise in pyramids or unfold in fans of flowers. 
 
 The birds seem at times to aim at those orchestral 
 effects in which all the instruments mingle in a maze of 
 harmony. 
 
 If it were possible to identify ourselves with spring, 
 to carry this thought to the point of believing that all the 
 life, all the love which leavens Nature culminates in our- 
 selves ; to feel ourselves at once flower, verdure, bird, 
 song, freshness, elasticity, delight, serenity, what would 
 become of me ? There are moments when, by dint of con- 
 centrating one's thoughts on this idea, and of gazing in- 
 tently on Nature, one seems to experience some such 
 thing. 
 
 May ist. — Heavens ! how gloomy ! wind, rain, and 
 cold. This first of May gives me the idea of a wedding- 
 day turned into a day for a funeral. Yesterday evening 
 was all moonlight and stars — a blue sky, whose limpid 
 clearness might send you to the seventh heaven of rap- 
 ture. To-day I have seen nothing but showers streaming 
 through the air in disordered ranks, driven furiously be- 
 fore a mad wind. I have heard nothing but this same 
 wind wailing on every side of me with those pitiful and 
 sinister wails which it catches or learns I know not 
 where ; one would say it seems the very blast of mis- 
 fortune, of calamity, of all the afllictions which I imagine 
 to be hovering in our atmosphere, shaking our dwellings 
 and chanting its mournful prophecies about our windows. 
 This wind, whatever it may be, at the same time that it 
 was affecting my soul so sadly by its mysterious spirit, 
 was agitating external Nature by its material power, and 
 perhaps also by something more j for who knows if we 
 are acquainted with the whole range of the mutual rela- 
 
V 
 
 
 Journal, 83 
 
 tions and intercourse of the elements ? I saw this wind 
 from my window doing his utmost against the trees, 
 driving them to despair. He threw himself, at times, 
 upon the forest with such impetuosity, that it was thrown 
 into billows like a sea, and I expected to see the whole 
 forest, pivoted on its roots, turn and spin like an immense 
 whirlwind. The four great firs behind the house re- 
 ceived from time to time such rude shocks that they 
 seemed to take fright, and uttered, as it were, shouts of 
 terror to make one tremble. The birds who ventured to 
 fly were swept along like straws \ I saw them — hardly 
 breasting with a feeble struggle against the current, and 
 only able at most to keep their wings stretched out — at 
 last drifting rapidly down the wind. Those which stay 
 in their hiding-places give feeble signs of life by begin- 
 ning their song and suddenly stopping. The flowers look 
 draggled and tattered ; everything seems bowed with 
 sorrow. I am more sad than in winter. In these days, 
 there is revealed in the depth of my soul, in the inner- 
 most, the profoundest recesses of its being, a sort of despair 
 altogether strange ; it is like the abandonment of an out- 
 er darkness, where God is not. My God, how comes it 
 that my repose is affected by what passes in the air, and 
 that the peace of my soul is thus given up to the caprice 
 of the winds ? O ! the truth is that I know not how to 
 control myself ; that my will is not one with Thine, and 
 as there is no other thing it can lay hold of, I have be- 
 come the sport of every breath that blows. 
 
 3</. — A joyful day, full of sunshine ; a balmy breeze, 
 perfumes in the air ; in the soul, bliss. The verdure 
 grows visibly ; it has darted from the garden into the 
 copses ; it has got the upper hand all along the pond j 
 it leaps, so to speak, from tree to tree, from thicket to 
 
 \. 
 
84 • Maurici de Guerin. 
 
 thicket, in the fields and on the hill-sides, and I see where 
 it has already reached the forest, and begins to overflow 
 upon its huge back. Soon it will have spread as far as 
 the eye can reach, and all these wide spaces enclosed by 
 the horizon will be waving and murmuring like a vast sea, 
 a sea of emerald. A few days more, and we shall have all 
 the pomp, all the display of the vegetable kingdom. 
 
 "jth. — I have this moment received a letter and some 
 verses from my dear Francois,* in reply to the piece 
 which I had addressed to him. This friendship I have 
 formed with him is delightful. Frangois is one of the 
 freshest, the purest, the most consoling souls that I have 
 ever known. Moreover, he is a poet, and nothing else ; 
 a poet, not by effort and labor, as so many are, but by 
 development and by a natural gift of expression. Poetry 
 gushes from him like water from a fountain. His frieilti- 
 ship is so much the dearer to me, and I understand his 
 talent so much the better as I am far from deserving the 
 one and rivalling the other. I am so little like him ! but 
 I find comfort in thinking that friendship springs from 
 contrasts. 
 
 ^th. — Five or six days of sun without the shadow of a 
 cloud. The unfolding of the leaves is almost accomplish- 
 ed. Nature has decked herself in all her ornament. 
 She has arrived at that unique moment of freshness, of 
 purity, of grace, that must be seized as it passes, for it 
 passes quickly. The leaves which opened yesterday are 
 tender as the dew, and of a transparent green ; I hardly 
 dare touch them lest they should wither. The day before 
 yesterday, however, I gathered a few with !Elie — some 
 beech-leaves, to make a dish of them, after the manner 
 
 * M, Fran9ois du Breil de Marzan, author of " La Famille et 
 I'Autel." 
 
Journal, 95 
 
 of the monks of St. Bernard. They are not bad ; they 
 have some flavor, but they are rather tough. I actually 
 had some pangs of remorse for having plucked those 
 poor new-born leaves. They would have lived their life, 
 rejoiced in the sun, and rocked in the wind. I thought 
 of all this while I was cutting them, and yet my hand 
 went on still ravaging the boughs. Moreover, in com- 
 mitting this little act of cruelty, I had one of those inter- 
 views with Elie which come from time to time, always 
 with a charming relief to the soul. As we went home 
 with a full basket, we promised each other to pluck some 
 leaves from time to time, to keep green the memory of 
 our talk. 
 
 La Chenaie has the air of a gray and wrinkled old 
 woman, transformed by the fairies' wand into a young and 
 most winning girl of sixteen. It has all the freshness, 
 all the brilliancy, all the mysterious charm of maiden- 
 hood. But, alas ! how short a time will this last ! M. 
 F^li showed us yesterday some leaves already perforated 
 and notched by the insects. 
 
 It has rained all night. The greenness and life aug- 
 ment. Towards seven o'clock I took a walk along the 
 pond. The trees hanging over the water were dripping 
 slowly, and each drop fell upon the smooth surface with 
 a little plaintive echo. One would have said that the 
 trees, having wept all night, were drying their tears. 
 
 " Do you know," said M. Feli to us day before 
 yesterday evening, "why man is the most suffering of 
 creatures ? It is because he has one foot in the finite 
 and the other in the infinite, and thus is torn asunder, not 
 by four horses, as in the barbarous ages, but by two 
 worlds." 
 
 Again, hearing the clock strike, he said : " If you 
 
86 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 should tell this clock it must lose its head the next minute, 
 none the less would it strike the hour until that minute 
 came. My children, be like the clock ; happen what 
 happen must, always strike your hour." 
 
 22d. — There are no longer flowers on the trees. 
 Their mission of love fulfilled, they are dead like a moth- 
 er who perishes in giving life. The fruit has set ; it feels 
 the influence of the vital and reproductive energy which 
 is to throw upon the world new individuals. An in- 
 numerable generation actually hangs on the branches of 
 all the trees, on the fibres of the most insignificant grass- 
 es, like babes on the mother's breast. All these germs, 
 incalculable in their number and variety, are there sus- 
 pended in their cradle between heaven and earth, and 
 given over to the winds whose charge it is to rock these 
 beings. Unseen amid the living forests swing the 
 forests of the future. Nature is all absorbed in the vast 
 cares of her maternity. 
 
 23^. — We have succeeded in launching on the pond 
 an old longboat which we have drawn out of the mire 
 where it had been buried for more than a year. It has 
 cost a good bit to repair it, but we are well paid for our 
 trouble by the pleasure we take in our little voyages. 
 This longboat belonged to a Swedish ship. Who knows 
 in what seas she has sailed ? Had she made the tour of 
 the world, on this little sheet of water she must neverthe- 
 less soon go to decay. 
 
 ywte 12th. — These twenty days have passed wretch- 
 edly, and so wretchedly that I have not had the spirit to 
 write a word here or elsewhere. My m.alady has re- 
 turned with extreme violence, and has almost reduced 
 me to despair. It is equal to my severest sufferings in 
 the past. A letter from Eugenie, which reached me 
 
Journal. 87 
 
 during the most violent paroxysm, did me great good j 
 but it was necessary that the crisis should have its course. 
 God and good angels, have pity on me ! Save me from 
 such sufferings ! 
 
 13M. — Except for the verdure, one would think him- 
 self in December. The fine weather has departed I 
 know not whither. The sun will lose his good name ; it 
 is so cold that one shivers. This villainous west wind, 
 with its innumerable flocks of clouds, has taken possession 
 of the sky, and deluges us with rain. One seems to see 
 up in the clouds Winter, passing with his sombre train. 
 Nothing can be more disheartening than the green-grow- 
 ing earth, and the rich carpet of marvellous pattern, 
 which Spring has spread for her beautiful feet, contrasted 
 with the canopy of heaven all black with rainy clouds. 
 I picture to myself a wedding solemnized in a church 
 hung with black. Oh ! besides, even in the finest days, 
 v/hat a difference between the sky of Brittany and that 
 of our South ! Here, Summer, in her days of high festival, 
 has always something gloomy, veiled, shut in. It is like 
 a miser making a display ; there is always a churlishness 
 in his magnificence. Give me our sky of Languedoc, so 
 lavish in light, so blue, so widely arched ! 
 
 i^th. — " Strange dream." I dreamed that I was 
 alone in a vast cathedral. I seemed to be in the 
 presence of God, and in that state of the soul in which 
 one is conscious only of God and of oneself, when a 
 voice arose. This voice — the voice of a woman, infinitely 
 sweet, — nevertheless filled the whole church like a vast 
 chorus. I recognized it at once ; it was the voice of 
 L , " silver-sweet sounding." 
 
 i^th. — Three nights in succession the same figure has 
 appeared to me. What am I to think of that } 
 
88 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 23^. — "I know well that I am a poor, spiritless 
 creature." O ! how well said, my dear Bernardin ! How 
 well you have expressed the sentiment of a soul urged to 
 rise above its sphere, and which, deej^ly conscious of its 
 own weakness, utters the cry which you represent as ad- 
 dressed to Virginia, — I know well that I am a miserable 
 creature ! For a long time I have been repeating to my- 
 self these words ; they are the summary of all my 
 labors, of my whole life. Oh ! if I were poor on 
 this side alone, well and good ; but my poverty is almost 
 universal — yes, universal, and my brain will never 
 work out any great good, neither for myself, nor 
 for those who have the right to expect something 
 from me. That it is which distresses me. I have 
 mistaken my path. By taking a totally opposite direc- 
 tion, I could have done something useful. It is im- 
 possible to carry my attempts further than I have 
 already done. That which I am now in the course of 
 completing cannot be recalled. After that, who shall 
 say what may happen to me ? The invisible thread of 
 Providence will always draw me to the better side. 
 
 2^th. — I have many things to say ; let me hasten to 
 say them. I have an annoyance which would fain declare 
 itself, and find vent spite of everything. My soul has 
 suffered so much that I ought to be proof against pin- 
 pricks, if it were with the soul as with the body, which 
 grows callous under blows as iron hardens under the 
 hammer. But with the soul everything goes against the 
 grain. I should like extremely "^ * # # * 
 
 yuly Afth. — I have received the finishing stroke. Be- 
 hold me well and duly convicted of the most stupid 
 
 * The end of this sentence is erased in the original manuscript. 
 
Journal, 89 
 
 awkwardness that can be imagined. I look upon this 
 incident as a judgment without appeal ; and so much the 
 better, in one way ; it will teach me to estimate myself 
 at my real worth. The rate of my valuation is henceforth 
 fixed, and by experts. This is what comes of listening 
 to vain thoughts. I kept saying to myself that sooner or 
 later I should come to grief; I kept ridiculing myself; to- 
 day, I have played the braggart, and here I am igno- 
 miniously driven back within my lines. Oh ! I solemn- 
 ly declare, by what I have suffered and by the respect I 
 owe to my soul, that I have made my last sally. I intend 
 to barricade myself in, immure myself against every 
 temptation, as immovable as a boundary stone, even if I 
 must pine away. I have somewhere read that thousands 
 of animalcules swim freely in a drop of water ; the cir- 
 cumference of my intellectual domain is about equal, I 
 think, to that of the drop ; and I am alone in it. Have I 
 not reason to be happy without further disturbing my re- 
 pose by dreams of ambition ? Oh ! yes, my little world, 
 my invisible wee drop, thou art mine alone, and to thee 
 alone will I henceforth belong. If I meet with some 
 being as insignificant as myself who begs to be let in, I 
 will gladly show him hospitality, I will receive him cordially, 
 grateful for the sympathy which has prompted him to 
 knock at my door ; I will lead him all through my dwell- 
 ing, exposing all details to his curiosity, as though it 
 were a palace ; we will talk with delight of a thousand lit- 
 tle, little things, which will be, for us, most important affairs ; 
 pleasures, pains, labors, discoveries, philosophy, poetry, all 
 these will be discussed in our interviews, but in proportions 
 suited to the infinitesimal limit of our conceptions and to 
 the diminutive scope of our souls. After having regaled 
 ourselves to our hearts' content with talk and sympathy. 
 
90 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 I shall conduct my guest as far as the door, and, leaving 
 him a kiss and a good-by (two touching things which 
 always go in company), I shall slide the bolts and keep 
 snug within my microscopic universe, until the knocker 
 again announces that a sympathetic heart waits without 
 to send greeting to me. 
 
 I'jth. — Yesterday, I saw swallows flying in the clouds, 
 an omen of fair weather which has not deceived me. I 
 am writing at the close of a beautiful day, very brilliant, 
 very warm, after a month and a half of clouds and cold ] 
 but this fine sun, which generally does me so much good, 
 has passed over me like a quenched star ; it has left me 
 as it found me, cold, frozen, insensible to all external im- 
 pression, and suffering, in the little of me that is still 
 alive, baxTcn and miserable experiences. My inner life 
 pines every day, and I sink deeper I know not into what 
 abyss, and already I must have reached a great depth, 
 for light has almost ceased to come to me, and I feel a 
 coldness creeping over me. Oh ! I know well what it is 
 that drags me down j I have always said it, and to-day, 
 in falling, will say it more strongly than ever ; it is the 
 distressing conviction of my impotence, it is this fatal im- 
 potence, a tendency whose germ I brought hither, and 
 which, during these eight months, has so strengthened that 
 it has finished by crushing, overwhelming me, and has 
 hurled me down a precipice whose depths are limitless. 
 Yes, I am falling, that is certain, for I no longer see what 
 I once saw ; what I once felt, I no longer feel. 
 
 August ist. — For some time past, like a converted 
 sinner, I have forced myself to love what I hated, and to ' 
 hate what I loved. I have solemnly forsworn poetry, 
 contemplation, all my ideal life. I have promised my- 
 self to live contentedly in a little world of my own fashion- 
 
Journal, 91 
 
 ing, whence I have banished all the beautiful phantoms 
 which peopled the world I formerly inhabited. I have 
 thought that an existence circumscribed by a very narrow 
 circle of fact, confined like the ant in a little hole hollow- 
 ed in the sand, would be worth more to me than those 
 adventurous but barren excursions of thought into a 
 world which has so decidedly repelled me. But alas ! 
 it is decreed that my poor imagination shall have no 
 place of rest here below. This little corner that I had 
 chosen for it in the realities of life, in order that it might 
 slumber there, refuses it shelter, as already the ideal 
 sphere has done. What will become of me in this state 
 of suspense between two spheres of action, in this region 
 where thought sustains itself only because it is equally 
 repelled by both ? 
 
 \2th. — I come here now only at long intervals, because 
 sweet and edifying hours revisit me only from time to 
 time. Such a chill has seized my soul that everything 
 that comes in contact with it is instantly benumbed. I 
 know not what paralysis has stricken me ; I know not 
 what indifference, a hundred times more painful than 
 the most nervous sensibility, causes me to pass entire 
 weeks without taking heed of anything. 
 
 \\th. — After a long series of radiant days, I like 
 much, on some fine morning, to find the sky hung with 
 gray, and all nature reposing, in a sort of melancholy 
 calm, from her festival days. It is exactly so to-day. 
 An immense, motionless veil, without a single fold, covers 
 the whole face of the sky ; the horizon is circled with a 
 heavy crown of blueish vapors ; not a breath of air. 
 Favored by this silence, every sound arising from the far- 
 away fields reaches the ear — the songs of the laborer, the 
 voices of children, chirpings and the peculiar cries of 
 
92 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 animals, and from time to time a dog barking I know not 
 where, and cocks who signal each other like sentinels. 
 Within me, also, all is calm and tranquil. A gray and 
 pensive veil has fallen over my soul, like the peaceful 
 clouds over Nature. A great silence reigns, and I hear, 
 as it were, the voices of a thousand sweet and touching 
 recollections, which arise in the far-off past and come 
 murmuring to my ear. 
 
 2^th. — To-morrow it will be a year since I set out for 
 
 R J with Eugenie. Sweet anniversary ! To-morrow 
 
 also will be for me a day of travel. I am going to La 
 Brousse to pass a few days of friendship and comfort 
 with my dear Frangois. 
 
 September ist. — Alas ! then, this is the way in which 
 everything ends — regrets, tears ! It is just an hour since 
 I returned from a charming little journey, and I am weep- 
 ing like a child, and am consumed with regret for a hap- 
 piness which I ought to have enjoyed without clinging to 
 it, knowing that it must be very brief ; but it is always 
 thus. Every time that I fall in with some little happi- 
 ness, it is desolation to part from it, because I know, that 
 I must fall back upon myself and resume my painful 
 routine. 
 
 3^. — Behold me struggling in a terrible situation, me 
 with the weakest of all characters, the most timid of all 
 wills. 
 
 26th. — The associations which cling to natural ob- 
 
 Ploermel, October 1st. — I know not what stopped 
 me short in the midst of my fine phrase, but I wished to 
 express what came into my mind at the sight of a dense 
 fog weighing upon the landscape. When the sun had 
 risen a little above the horizon, I saw all this fog gradu- 
 
Journal (^';i^ 
 
 ally brighten, and, penetrated with light, begin its upward 
 movement toward the sky, where it soon vanished. Be- 
 fore a quarter of an hour had passed, it was beautifully 
 serene ; but, some time after the centre of the horizon 
 had cleared, I still saw trails of fog sweeping along the 
 distant crests like the last fugitives of a routed army, and 
 it was to this that my association and my unfinished 
 phrase related. Last year, on a similar occasion, I was 
 also looking at the fogs rising into the sky and unhood- 
 ing the mountains, and in these majestic regions, this 
 spectacle assumed a character of infinite grandeur. One 
 might almost believe he saw the primitive shadows flee- 
 ing away — God, like a sculptor, lifting with his hand the 
 drapeiy which veiled his work, and the earth exposed in 
 all the purity of its earliest forms to the rays of the 
 primal sun. But this was not yet the essence of the asso- 
 ciation. Often, at the moment when the fog began to 
 lift from the earth and become transparent, and when, 
 my forehead pressed against the panes, I watched the 
 changes of the mist, a blue dress — # * * 
 
 Heavens ! how beautiful the sky is, this evening ! As 
 I was writing the last sentence, I turned my head towards 
 the window, and my eyes were flooded with tints so soft, 
 so delicate, so velvet-like, — I saw so many wonderful 
 things in the horizon, that I could not refrain from throw- 
 ing in here this exclamation of rapture. It is the autumn 
 twilight in all its melancholy. The distant clumps of 
 woods, their majestic plumes capriciously undulating, 
 shut in the view with charming effect. The trees, isolated, 
 whether by their position or by their great size, present 
 an expression, a character, I might almost say features 
 which seem to indicate, as it were, the mute passions and 
 unknown things which exist, perhaps, under the bark of 
 
94 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 these motionless beings. With their attitudes and the 
 nodding of their heads, they seem, in the evening ghm- 
 mer, to be acting I know not what mysterious scene. 
 Each day, since I came here, the twilight has given me 
 some of these magnificent representations. 
 
 A blue dress, as I said, flitted rapidly through the 
 mist, and disappeared in those white shadows, like the 
 blue bird which skims along the ponds and streams. 
 Sometimes this apparition fled along, singing, and left 
 behind her a flow of silvery notes, as it were, which rip- 
 pled forth with ineflable melody. A quarter of an hour 
 later, when the atmosphere had become clear, and the 
 lingering trail of the fog was still creeping along the tops 
 
 of the most distant mountains, I saw L enter with a 
 
 slow step and a serious air, like a philosopher emerging 
 from a revery. 
 
 I have wept over leave-takings last year and this, 
 almost date for date. One must not compare these 
 regrets — they are of too diverse a nature : they resemble 
 each other only in their depth. Both are inexpressible. 
 If I wished to draw a strong parallel between them, I 
 would say that last year, in September, at two o'clock 
 in the afternoon, under a clear sky, I said farewell to 
 that happiness which is found at a certain point in the 
 path of life, which leads you a few leagues, entertaining 
 you with the enrapturing words of an angel, and then 
 suddenly, let a cross-road appear, takes the left if you 
 are taking the right, saying with a mocking sweetness : 
 "Traveller! adieu! a pleasant journey, traveller ! " And 
 I should add that this year, in September, at four o'clock 
 in the evening, in gray and foggy weather, I have em- 
 braced, at parting, a man whom I love with that ardent 
 affection, like no other, kindled in the depth of the soul, 
 
Journal. 95 
 
 I know not by what strange power peculiar to men of 
 genius. M. Feli has been my guide in Hfe during nine 
 months, at the end of which the fatal cross-road has ap- 
 peared. The habit of living with him has made me heed- 
 less of what was passing in my soul ; but since I no 
 longer see him, I am conscious of a great laceration, as 
 it were, at the moment of separation. 
 
 2d. — Six o'clock in the evening. It is the moment 
 when recollections throng upon me by thousands, like 
 the birds that flock at the same hour to the rendezvous 
 they have appointed in a great poplar, where they chatter 
 confusedly until night puts them to sleep. The sunset 
 is enchanting. The clouds, which have escorted him to 
 the west, open at the horizon, like a group of courtiers 
 who see the king approaching, and then close after his 
 passage. The sun having set, some of these clouds 
 return and again mount the sky, arrayed in the most 
 beautiful colors. The more sluggish remain at the gates 
 of the palace, like a company of guards with gilded shields. 
 These clouds do not quite touch the horizon : a luminous 
 belt, tapering towards the extremities, runs between them 
 and the blue line of the earth. A few slim poplars in 
 the distance, which seem to spring from this blue line, 
 and whose slender forms are clearly defined against the 
 pure, luminous belt, represent the masts of ships at 
 anchor on the horizon of the sea. 
 
 A,th. — If I knew something of drawing, I should have 
 brought back some sketch of our yesterday's trip to 
 Josselin. I have at last seen an old baronial castle. 
 Enormous towers, Cyclopean ramparts, inclose within 
 their massive zone an architecture in appearance the 
 most graceful, the most slender, the most frail, one of 
 those dreams of the middle a^e, embroidered in air upon 
 
96 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 stone with the delicacy of a fairy-needle. At twilight, 
 take a leaf whose pulp has been devoured by insects, 
 and by the dying light consider this net-work of delicate 
 veins and fibres ; you will have, as it were, a miniature 
 of the fanciful traceries of Gothic art, 
 
 ^th. — The most beautiful days, the most agreeable 
 studies cannot allay in me this moaning thought which 
 is the ceaseless refrain of humanity. 
 
 14M. — While I go on pursuing a swarm of vain 
 thoughts, like a man who has nothing more to trouble 
 him, my whole future is upset. They tell me that I 
 must mingle again with the world. Strange caprice ! 
 I have caught myself a hundred times longing for its 
 untried life, and to-day, when solitude and retirement 
 have set me adrift, the world affrights me. Oh! the 
 truth is, this was my niche ; in spite of my whims and 
 my freaks of worldliness, I cling to it with all my heart. 
 I was beginning to see clearly into my destiny, and now 
 once more all is unintelligible. Great God ! 'tis cruel 
 indeed ! What would'st thou do with me, then, among 
 men ? What will become, in that whirlpool, of me, the 
 most feeble of creatures ? Oh ! in this I well know my 
 trial lies. I thought I was sufficiently convinced of my 
 impotence, of my weakness, of the diseased and imper- 
 fect organization of my moral nature. Alas ! it seems 
 that I am not sufficiently convinced of it, since I am 
 sent back into the world, that great destroyer of all 
 inner joy, of all noble energy, of all innocent hope. 
 
 24M. — Truly, a ramble in the fields is ever a fresh 
 delight. What happiness to fling off this dull chain of 
 every-day life, and escape into the country, where one 
 breathes freely; where one tastes the exalted pleasure 
 of a few hours' liberty ; where the heart is lifted and 
 
Journal, 97 
 
 the thoughts turn to contemplation ; where one is en- 
 chanted to find one's humanity face to face with Nature. 
 We made the circuit of a pond two leagues in circum- 
 ference. It was long since I had taken so much pleasure 
 in an excursion. The sight of water always charms me 
 exceedingly, and to-day everything was as enchanting as 
 I could wish. This pond stretches its beautiful form 
 between two woods, whose borders describe lines grace- 
 ful in their irregularity. At the close of day, there was 
 something infinitely melancholy in this green and shadowy 
 sheet of water, in the pale color of the woods beginning 
 to cast their leaves, and the gray tint of the sky where 
 flocks of crows and wild ducks were silently passing. 
 A thousand sweet, sad thoughts came to me. I remem- 
 bered that in my childhood, at this same hour, I loved 
 to sit on the terrace at Le Cayla, and watch the passing 
 birds seeking a shelter for the night. 
 
 Le Val, December "jth. — After a year of perfect calm, 
 save internal storms, for which solitude is not to be 
 blamed — for it has wrapped me in such peace and quiet, 
 that a soul less restless than mine would have been de- 
 liciously cradled ; — after a year, as I say, of this complete 
 rest, my fate, which had led me into the holy retreat to 
 find some repose, has knocked at the door to recall me ; 
 for she had not gone on her way, but had seated herself 
 upon the threshold, waiting until I had recovered suffi- 
 cient strength to resume my journey. " Thou hast tarried 
 long enough," said she to me ; " come, forward ! " And 
 she has taken me by the hand, and behold her again on 
 the march, like those poor women one meets on the road, 
 leading a child, who follows with a sorrowful air. But 
 what folly to complain ! and are there in the world no 
 other sufferings than mine to water with my tears ? I 
 5 
 
98 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 will henceforth say to the sources of my tears, " Cease 
 your flowing;" and to the Lord, "Lord, hearken not 
 to my complaints," as often as I invoke the Lord and 
 my tears in my own behalf; for it is well that I should 
 suffer — I, who can obtain nothing in heaven by the merit 
 of deeds, and who will obtain my little something only 
 by virtue of suffering, like all feeble souls. Such souls 
 have no wings to rise to heaven, and the Lord, who 
 nevertheless wishes that they should come thither, sends 
 them aid. He piles around them the thorny faggots, 
 and causes the fire of anguish to descend ; the wood con- 
 sumed, it springs to heaven in the form of a white vapor, 
 like the doves that used to take their flight from the 
 midst of the dying flames of the martyrs' stake. It is 
 the soul which has consummated its sacrifice, and which 
 the fire of tribulation has made so etherial that it may 
 soar to heaven, like a smoke. AVood is heavy and inert ; 
 but add the element of fire, and even a part of that 
 rises to the clouds. 
 
 Lord, I am one of those souls. I must not then shed 
 tears to extinguish the fires of my martyrdom. But I 
 will shed floods of tears for those who suffer, and suffer 
 unjustly. Above all, I will shed them for Him who is 
 to-day a prey to the deepest bitterness, and who has 
 already wrought so much good that He seems to abound 
 in merit, without needing to gain new merits by the path 
 of suffering. I will weep over Him and over those who 
 do Him wrong — wrong that recoils on me. Jesus Christ 
 having shed upon His murderers the priceless virtue of 
 His blood, the least that men can do is to weep over their 
 enemies. 
 
 I will hold sacred these tears and the treasured 
 memories which I bear away from this blissful roof of 
 
Journal, 99 
 
 La Chenaie, which for a year has sheltered my life, hid- 
 den in the bosom of a priest whom men count among 
 the glories of the earth, and whom the saints claim as 
 one of them in heaven. Although my grief be very bitter, 
 I will not hang my harp on the willows by the river, be- 
 cause the Christian, unlike the Israelite, should sing the 
 song of God and of the Son of God, even in a strange 
 land. 
 
 And see how full of goodness Providence is to me. 
 For fear that the sudden transition from the mild and 
 tempered air of a religious and solitary life to the torrid 
 zone of the world, should try my soul too sorely, it has 
 led me, on leaving the holy retreat, into a home standing 
 on the confines of the two regions, where, without being 
 in solitude, one still belongs not to the world ; a house 
 whose windows, on one side, open upon the plain where 
 sways the tumult of man, and on the other, upon a desert 
 where chant the servants of God. I wish to record here 
 the history of my sojourn in it, for the days passed here 
 are full of happiness, and I know that in the future I 
 shall turn back many a time to reperuse their vanished 
 joy. A religious man and a poet ;* a woman so well 
 fitted to him that they seem but a twofold soul ; a child 
 who is named for her mother, Marie, and the first rays 
 of whose love and intelligence are piercing, like a star, 
 the white cloud of childhood. A simple life, in an old 
 house ; the ocean morning and evening sending us its 
 harmonies ; finally, a traveller descending from Carmel 
 to go to Babylon, who, laying down his staff and sandals, 
 has seated himself at the hospitable table : here is mate- 
 
 * Hippolyte La Morvonnais, author of the Thebdide de$ 
 Greves. 
 
lOO Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 rial for a biblical poem, if I could write things as I feel 
 them.* 
 
 Wi. — Yesterday the wind blew furiously from the 
 west. I have seen the sea in commotion, but this 
 tumult, sublime as it is, is far inferior, to my taste, to 
 the view of the ocean calm and blue. But why say that 
 the one is not equal to the other ? Who could measure 
 these two sublime sights and say. The second surpasses 
 the first ? We must simply say : my soul finds more 
 pleasure in the calm than in the storm. Yesterday, one 
 wide battle waged on the watery plains. To see the 
 leaping waves, the thought would have been of those 
 countless squadrons of Tartars, galloping incessantly 
 over the plains of Asia. The entrance to the bay is 
 guarded, as it were, by a chain of granite islets : it was 
 glorious to see the surges rushing to the assault, and 
 hurling themselves frantically, with frightful clamors, 
 against the masses of rock ; to see them take their line 
 of attack, and vie with each other which should first sur- 
 mount the black head of the reefs. The boldest or the 
 most agile vaulted over with a loud shout; the others, 
 lumbering on more awkwardly, dashed against the rock, 
 flinging showers of spray of a dazzling whiteness, and 
 fell back with a low, muffled growling, like watch-dogs 
 beaten back by the traveller's staff. 
 
 We witnessed these wild struggles from the top of a 
 cliff, where we found it difficult to withstand the buffets 
 of the wind. The vast tumult of the sea, the clamorous 
 
 * In the first edition may be found a different version of the end 
 of this passage, and of the four passages which follow. In this edi- 
 tion we have substituted, after the text of the Greejt Note-book, a 
 version which the author had afterwards written on loose leaves, 
 and which, without doubt, he himself preferred. 
 
. Journal, loi 
 
 rush of the waves, the equally rapid, but silent sweep of 
 the clouds, the sea-birds hovering in the sky and bal- 
 ancing their slender bodies between two arched wings 
 that seemed to spread indefinitely, this entire assemblage 
 of wild and echoing harmonies, all centering in the souls 
 of two beings five feet high, planted upon the crest of a 
 cliff, shaken like leaves by the violence of the wind, and 
 hardly more visible in that immensity than two birds 
 perched upon a clod of earth — oh ! it was something 
 mysterious and awful, one of those mingled moments of 
 sublime excitement and profound meditation, when the 
 soul and Nature, drawing themselves to their full height, 
 confront each other. 
 
 From the height we descended into a gorge which 
 forms a retreat for the sea, such as the ancients knew 
 how to describe, where peaceful, murmuring waves come 
 to sleep, while their wilder brothers lash the rocks and 
 struggle together. Enormous blocks of gray granite, 
 mottled with white moss, are scattered in confusion over 
 the hill-side which has opened to receive this bay. So 
 oddly do they lie, and so far over the edge do they lean, 
 one would say that a giant had some day amused himself 
 in casting them from the top of the bank, and that their 
 course had been arrested wherever an obstacle had been 
 encountered ; some, a few steps from the point of depar- 
 ture, others, half-way down the bank j but yet seemed 
 they rather suspended than arrested, or rather they seem- 
 ed to be still rolling. The noise of the winds and waves 
 which resounds in this echoing cavern sends forth the 
 most beautiful harmonies. We made quite a long stay 
 there, leaning, all wonder-struck, upon our staffs. 
 
 (^th. — The moon and some stars were still shining, 
 when the bell summoned us to mass. I like particularly 
 
I02 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 this morning mass said between the last gleams of the 
 stars and the first rays of the sun. 
 
 In the evening, Hippolyte and I strolled along the 
 coast. We wished to see what the ocean is like at the 
 close of a gray and calm December day. The fog con- 
 cealed the offing, but gave sufficient range of view to 
 suggest the infinity of waters. We were posted on a 
 point where stands a custom-house officer's hut, and we 
 leaned against the hut. On the right, a wood, spread 
 over the slope of the coast, displayed in the paling light 
 its bare, ragged branches, rustling gently. On the left, 
 far in the distance, the tower of the l^bihens now half 
 vanished as it merged in the shadows, now reappeared 
 with a faint light on its face, when a stealthy ray of 
 twilight managed to slip through the clouds. The noise 
 of the sea was calm and dreamy as in the most beautiful 
 days ; only it had something more mournful. Our ears 
 followed this voice v/hich gradually sounded all along the 
 coast, and we drew breath again only after the surge 
 which had given birth to it had retired to make way for 
 its successor. I think this extraordinary, vibrating song 
 of the sea springs from the deep hea\7' voice of the surf, 
 rolling up and breaking, united with the light and pebbly 
 noise of the same surf as it retires, gently washing the 
 sand and the shells. But why analyze this music. I 
 shall never say anything worthy of the subject, for I 
 understand nothing of analysis. Let me return, then, to 
 sentiment. 
 
 The darkness was thickening about us, and still v/e 
 did not dream of going, for the harmony of the sea went 
 on increasing in proportion as all sounds of earth ceased, 
 and night unfolded her mysteries. Like those statues 
 which the ancients used to place on the promontories, we 
 
Journal, 103 
 
 Gtood motionless, fascinated, as it were, and spell-bound 
 by the charm of the ocean and the night. We gave no 
 sign of life save by raising the head when we heard the 
 whistling wings of the wild ducks pass. 
 
 The course of my wandering fortunes has led me to a 
 solitary cape of Brittany, there to dream away an autumn 
 evening. There, for a few hours, were hushed all those 
 inner voices which have never been really quieted since 
 the first tempest arose in my bosom. There, all sweet 
 and heavenly sadnesses flocked into my soul with the har- 
 monies of the sea, and my soul wandered as in a paradise 
 of reveries. Oh ! when I shall have left Le Val and 
 poured my farewell tears into the bosom of your friend- 
 ship — when I am in Paris, where there is neither valley, 
 nor ocean, nor souls like yours — when I go about alone 
 with my sadness, and my soul sinks in despair, oh ! what 
 tears I shall shed at the thought of our evenings ! For^ 
 happiness is the fine, soft rain which penetrates the soul, 
 but which afterwards gushes from it in springs of tears. 
 
 2Qth. — I have nevei enjoyed with so much intimacy 
 and seclusion the happiness of home-life. Never has the 
 perfume which is wafted through all the rooms of a re- 
 ligious and happy home so completely enveloped me. It 
 is like a cloud of invisible incense that I breathe con- 
 tinually. All these minute details of familiar life, whose 
 successive links constitute my day, are so many shades 
 of a perpetual delight which goes on unfolding from the 
 beginning to the end of the day. 
 
 The morning greeting, which renews in some sort the 
 pleasure of my first arrival, — for we accost each other in 
 nearly the same form of words, and besides the separa- 
 tion at night is somewhat typical of longer separations, 
 like them full of dangers and uncertainties ; — breakfast, 
 
I04 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 when we forthwith celebrate the joy of re-union ; the sub- 
 sequent walk, a sort of greeting and adoration that we 
 offer to Nature ; our return and our seclusion in an old 
 wainscoted chamber, looking out on the sea, inaccessible 
 to the noise of the house — in a word, a perfect sanctuary 
 of labor ; dinner, announced to us not by the sound of the 
 bell, which savors too much of the college or a fine house, 
 but by a gentle voice ; the gayety, the lively jests, the 
 rippling flow of talk rising and falling during the entire 
 meal ; the crackling fire of dry brush around which we 
 draw our chairs just afterwards ; the tender things we 
 say in the warmth of the fire roaring as we chat, and if 
 the weather is fine, the stroll by the side of the ocean 
 which runs to welcome our party — a mother, her child in 
 her arms, the father of the child, and a stranger, these 
 last two each with a stick in his hand ; the rosy lips of 
 the little girl who prattles to the tune of the waves, the 
 tears that she sometimes sheds and the cries of childish 
 grief on the border of the sea ; our thoughts when we see 
 the mother and child smiling at each other, or the child 
 weeping and the mother seeking to soothe her with the 
 sweetness of her caresses and her voice ; the ocean, which 
 goes on rolling continuously its waves and noises \ the 
 dead branches that we cut, as we stray hither and thither 
 in the copses, to make a quick and cheerful fire on our 
 return ; this little experiment in wood-craft, which brings 
 us near to Nature, and makes us think of M. Feli's peculiar 
 love for the same occupation; the hours of study and 
 poetic out-pouring, which carry us along to supper-time ; 
 this meal to which we are summoned by the same gentle 
 voice, spent in the same pleasures as the dinner-hour, 
 but less boisterous, because evening softens and subdues 
 everything • the evening, opening with the sparkle of a 
 
JournalP^^t, ^^^^_ ^ 1 05 
 
 cheerful fire, and passing in alternate reading and talking, 
 to die away in sleep ; to all the charms of a day thus 
 spent, add that indescribable, angelic beaming, that halo 
 of peace, of freshness and innocence diffused by the 
 blond hair, the blue eyes, the silvery voice, the laughter, 
 the little knowing poutings of a child who, I feel certain, 
 makes more than one angel jealous, who enchants you, 
 bewitches you, makes you dotingly fond, by a simple 
 motion of her lips — such is the power of helplessness ! — to 
 all this add finally the dreams of the imagination, and 
 you will still be far from attaining the limit of all these 
 domestic delights. 
 
 21st. — For some days the weather has been at its 
 worst. The rain falls and the wind blows in gusts, but 
 with such fury that everything seems to be given over to 
 these terrible hail-storms. Three nights in succession 
 have I been startled from my sleep by one of these squalls, 
 which occur regularly towards midnight. They assault 
 the house so furiously that everything in it shakes and 
 trembles. I half rise in my bed and listen to the tempest 
 as it passes, and a thousand thoughts which lay sleeping, 
 some on the surface, others in the depths of my soul, 
 awake in excitement. 
 
 All the noises of Nature : the winds, those fearful 
 blasts from an unknown mouth, which play upon the 
 numberless instruments of Nature, whether in the plains, 
 on the mountains, along the hollows of the valleys, or 
 massed in the orchestra of the forest ; the waters, whose 
 scale of voices ranges over so infinite a compass, from 
 the soft rippling of a fountain over the moss to the grand 
 harmonies of the ocean ; the thunder, the voice of that 
 sea which heaves over our heads ; the dry leaves, which 
 rustle to a passing human tread or that of a playful breeze ; 
 
 5* 
 
io6 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 in short (for one must put an end to this enumeration, 
 which might be infinite), this continual utterance of sounds, 
 this ever-undulating murmur of the elements, expand my 
 thoughts into strange reveries, and throw me into mazes 
 whence there is no issue. The voice of Nature has ac- 
 quired such empire over me that I rarely succeed in free- 
 ing myself from the habitual pre-occupation which she 
 imposes, and attempt in vain to feign deafness. But to 
 wake at midnight, with the shrieks of the storm, to be as- 
 sailed in the darkness by a savage and furious harmony 
 which subverts the peaceful sway of night, is something 
 incomparable in the experience of strange impressions. It 
 is a terrible delight. 
 
 MoRDREUx, jfanuary 2d, 1834. — Day before yester- 
 day evening I was finishing a letter to Frederic thus : 
 
 " I am writing to you in the last hours of 1833. 
 There is an indescribably solemn sadness in this death- 
 struggle of the year. My heart is full of strange and 
 mournful thoughts, for the tempest roars without, and 
 the year expires in the convulsions of a gloomy and 
 stormy night." 
 
 I have suffered strangely this whole evening. The 
 incredible rapidity of life's passage, the mystery of our 
 destiny, the terrible questions which doubt at times ad- 
 dresses to men the most settled in their belief — in short, 
 this state which for me returns often enough, in which 
 the soul, like Lenore, feels itself transported with loosen- 
 ed rein to I know not what dismal regions, — all this has 
 taken hold of me. The same evening, I received con- 
 firmation of a report v/hich had been circulated for some 
 days : the defeat of a great man, who has surrendered his 
 pen as heroes surrender their swords, indignation in his 
 heart and tears in his eyes. Poor M. Feli ! you have 
 
JournaL 107 
 
 often pressed me to your bosom, I have breathed your 
 spirit, and my timid and undeserving glance has penetra- 
 ted to the bottom of your heart j for there were days 
 when you became so transparent, so limpid, that one 
 could look into your very depths, as into the clearest 
 fountain. Oh ! what grief seizes me when I see you so 
 misunderstood, and suffering so much evil for all the good 
 you fain would have done ! What man has been better 
 able to say to the Lord : " The zeal of Thy house hath 
 eaten me up " ? and you have been counted among those 
 whom Satan sends to sow dissensions in the house of 
 the Lord ! =* 
 
 Le Val, January 20th. — I passed three weeks at 
 Mordreux, f in the bosom of a family the most equable, 
 the most united, the most blessed of heaven than can be 
 imagined. And yet, in this calm, in this sweet monotony 
 of domestic life, my days were -inwardly so excited that I 
 think I have never experienced such uneasiness of heart 
 and brain. I know not what strange tenderness had 
 taken possession of my whole being, and drew tears from 
 my eyes for a mere nothing, as happens to little children 
 and old men. My heart swelled at every moment, and 
 my soul overflowed in secret bursts, in effusions of tears 
 and internal communings. I felt, as it were, a soft 
 languor that weighed upon my eyes, and at times bound 
 all my limbs. I ate with loathing, although urged by 
 
 * The end of the page is effaced in the original manuscript, and 
 the two following leaves have been torn out, no doubt by Guerin 
 himself. 
 
 t At the house of M. de la Villeon, fathcr-in-lav>r of Hippolyte 
 La Morvonnais. 
 
io8 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 appetite ; for I was pursuing tlioughts which intoxicated 
 me with such sweetness, and the happiness of my soul 
 communicated to my body an ease so indescribably 
 tender, that it recoiled from any act which would blunt 
 so keen a pleasure. I forced myself to resist this dan- 
 gerous exaltation, this impetuous feeling, whose peril I 
 realized ; but I was too much in its power to escape, and, 
 judging from all appearances, it was all over with me if I 
 had not found a powerful diversion in the contemplation \ 
 of Nature. 
 
 I set about studying her even more closely than had 
 been my wont, and by degrees the excitement subsided j 
 for there issued from fields, from waves, from woods, a 
 mild and wholesome virtue which penetrated my being, 
 and changed all my transports into melancholy dreams. 
 This blending of the calm suggestions of Nature with the 
 stormy ecstasies of the heart will beget a state of mind 
 which I would fain retain, for it is a most desirable state 
 for a restless dreamer like myself It is like a rapture so 
 subdued and tranquil that it carries the soul out of itself 
 without taking from it the consciousness of a lingering 
 and somewhat stormy sadness. Another result is that the 
 soul is insensibly steeped in a languor which deadens the 
 keenness of every intellectual faculty, and lulls it into a 
 half-sleep void of all thought, in which, nevertheless, it is 
 conscious of the faculty of dreaming the most beautiful 
 things. At other times, it is like a cloud which spreadsP 
 its soft tints over the soul, and casts that pleasant shadow^ 
 which invites to meditation and repose. The unrest also^J 
 the ardent activities, all the turbulent crowd which bustles 
 in the citadel of the heart, becomes silent, sometimes be- 
 takes itself to prayer, and always ends by composing itself 
 to slumber. Nothing can more faithfully represent this 
 
Journal, 109 
 
 state of the soul than the evening this moment falHng. 
 Gray clouds, whose edges are slightly silvered, are spread 
 uniformly over the whole face of the sky. The sun, which 
 vanished a few moments ago, has left behind him light 
 enough to relieve for some time the black shadows, and 
 in a manner to tone the falling darkness. The winds 
 are hushed, and the tranquil ocean sends up, when I go 
 out on the threshold to listen, only a melodious murmur, 
 which breaks on the soul like a beautiful wave on the 
 beach. The birds, the first to be won by the influence of 
 night, take their flight towards the woods, and their wings 
 are heard rustling in the clouds. The copse which covers 
 the whole hill-side of Le Val, which has echoed all day 
 with the warbling of the wren, with the cheerful whistle 
 of the woodpecker, and the various notes of a multitude 
 of birds, has no longer any sound in its paths and thick- 
 ] ets, save the shrill cry of the blackbirds chasing each 
 f other in their play, after all other birds have their heads 
 under their wings. The noise of man, always the last to 
 be hushed, gradually dies away along the fields. The 
 universal hum ceases, and one hears scarcely a sound 
 except what comes from the towns and hamlets, where, 
 far into the night, is heard the crying of children and the 
 barking of dogs. Silence enfolds me ; everythmg seeks 
 jepose, except my pen, which haply disturbs the slumber 
 of some living atom asleep in the leaves of my note-book, 
 for it makes its own little noise scratching these foolish 
 thoughts. Well ! let it cease, then ; for what I write, 
 have written, and shall write, can never be weighed 
 against the sleep of an atom. 
 
 Ten o'clock in the evening. A last walk, a last visit 
 to the sea, to the coast, to all this magnificent landscape 
 which has enchanted me for two months. Winter smiles 
 
 < 
 
 ( 
 
no Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 upon us with all the charm of Spring, and gives us days 
 which make the birds sing and hasten the leaf-budding 
 of the rose-bushes in the garden, the sweet-brier in the 
 woods, and the honeysuckle climbing along the walls and 
 rocks. At two o'clock we took the path which winds so 
 gracefully among the flowering furze and coarse grass of 
 the cliffs, runs along the wheat-fields, turns towards the 
 ravines, creeps between the hedges, and rises boldly 
 towards the most lofty rocks. The end of the walk was 
 a promontory which overlooks the bay of Quatre-Vaux. 
 The sea shone in all its brilliancy, and broke a hundred 
 feet below us with a sound which swept over our souls 
 as" if rose to the heavens. ^ Towards the horizon, the 
 fishermen's boats unfolded their sails of a dazzling white- 
 ness against the azure, and we glanced alternately from 
 this little fleet to another more numerous, which, to the 
 sound of singing, was rocking nearer to us. This was an 
 innumerable crowd of sea-birds gayly catching their fish, 
 and rejoicing our sight with their shining plumage and 
 their graceful poise upon the waves. These birds, these 
 sails, the beauty of the day, the universal serenity, gave 
 a holiday air to the ocean and filled my soul with a joy- 
 ful enthusiasm, in spite of the background of sad 
 thoughts which I had brougiit to our promontory. How- 
 ever, I abandoned myself with all my power of vision to 
 the contemplation of capes, rocks, islands, forcing myself 
 to take from them, as it were, an impression, and to trans- 
 fer it to my soul. Returning, with regret at each step, I 
 trod with sacred emotion that path which has so often 
 led me in such delightful companionship to such beauti- 
 ful meditations. This path is so full of charms when it 
 comes to the copse and runs between the overhanging 
 hazels and a hedge of scraggy boxwood ! There the 
 
^ 
 
 Journal. 1 1 1 
 
 joy which I had caught from Nature vanished, and I was 
 seized with the sadness of parting. To-morrow will make 
 of Jhis sea, of these coasts, of these woods, of the many" 
 delights that I have enjoyed, a dream, a floating thought 
 that will be merged in other thoughts. And in order to 
 talce with me as much as possible of the spirit of these 
 sweeFfegiohs, and as if it had been in their power to give 
 themselves to me, I inwardly supplicated them to imprint 
 themselves upon my soul, to infuse into me something 
 ' of themselves which should never pass away/ At the 
 Vsame time I put aside the branches of the box, of the 
 jbuslies, of the tangled thickets, and I thrust my head 
 \ iii!o~tEeir midst, to breathe the wild perfumes lurking 
 / there, to penetrate to their inmost being, and, as it were, 
 I talk heart to heart with them. 
 
 V.^l'irThe evening passed as usual in conversation and 
 reading. We retraced the happiness of tlie past days. 
 I have drawn a faint picture of it in this note-book. We 
 gazed upon it pensively, as on the picture of the loveliest, 
 the most cherished dead. 
 
 Hippolyte has gone to bed. I write this in the 
 solitude and silence of night, by the side of an extinguish- 
 ed fire. I have been listening at the door to the sounds 
 from without. They are few : the ocean has retired into 
 the distance, he is calm, he sleeps, we hear him not. 
 The Arguenon with broad windings flows along the 
 strand, the moon paces up and down its current, and 
 its shallows, where the water is ruffled, send up to us a 
 gentle murmur. The breeze scarcely sighs in the wood, 
 and all else is stfll. 
 
 Adieu, adieu, beloved abode ! If thou lovest me and 
 doubtest my constancy, hearken to this which shall re- 
 
112 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 assure thee : in losing solitude I lose the half of my soul. 
 I go out into the world with a secret horror, 
 
 Caen, jfanuary 2\th. — I have just been exploring 
 some of the streets of this city by the faint light of the 
 street lamps. What have I seen ? The black phantoms 
 of churches and their belfries, whose bulk alone I could 
 distinguish \ but the mystery of night, which enfolds them 
 and defines not their dimensions as would the broad 
 light of day, adds to their sacredness, and has touched 
 me with a sentiment which is better, I believe, than that 
 which springs from forms. My thought soared indefi- 
 nitely towards heaven with those spires, which seem to 
 have no end, and roved in terror all round those gloomy 
 naves, as around tombs. That was all. The streets 
 were crowded ; but what is a crowd in the night, or even 
 in the day ? In the night I prefer the noise of the winds, 
 and, during the day, those great assemblages now silent, 
 now roaring, which are called forests. Moreover, I met 
 some of those men who always prompt me to hasten 
 home as soon as possible, students so-called, who passed 
 in jaunty attire, and wore on every feature an indescrib- 
 able expression, which intimidates and puts me to con- 
 fusion. O my note-book ! my sweet friend, how I felt 
 that I loved thee in escaping from this multitude. Be- 
 hold now I am thine, although the night is far spent, and 
 I am all sore with fatigue j wholly thine, while I tell thee 
 my troubles and talk to thee peacefully in secret. Can I 
 ever sufficiently live over memories still steeped in tears, 
 and which will remain forever incorruptible in my soul ? 
 That good Hippolyte and his adorable Marie ! I had 
 said farewell to her ; she had answered in words of the 
 most touching kindness \ I had faltered out a few more 
 words and was hastily descending the staircase, thinking 
 
Journal. 113 
 
 that she had not crossed the threshold and that all was 
 over, when I heard a new farewell to me from above. I 
 raised my head and saw her leaning over the baluster. 
 I answered feebly, very feebly, for her voice had deprived 
 me of the little strength I had to restrain my tears. 
 
 Paris, February 1st. — My God ! close my eyes ; pre- 
 serve me from seeing all this multitude, the sight of whom 
 gives rise in me to thoughts so bitter, so discouraging. 
 Grant that, in passing through it, I may be deaf to noise, 
 inaccessible to those impressions which overwhelm me 
 when traversing the crowd ; and, to that end, place before 
 mine eyes an image, a vision of things that I love, a field, 
 a vale, a moor, Le Cayla, Le Val — some natural object. 
 I will walk with looks fixed upon those sweet forms, and 
 thus shall pass and feel no rude jostling. 
 
 17//^. — O purity of the fields! I was constantly as- 
 cending from Nature to God, and descending from God 
 to Nature. That was my inner life, mingled with some 
 melancholy, some heart-flutterings which, nevertheless, 
 only softened or quickened the current of my thoughts 
 without changing them. Nothing impure entered my 
 soul, and I felt the powers of my mind growing; for 
 when the inward man is pure, his thought rises un- 
 fettered, ever approaching the source of all intellectual 
 strength. I was beginning to rise above my discourage- 
 ments, and to acquire that beautiful and noble trust of 
 a heart which feels itself at one with God, and which can- 
 not be cast down so long as it rests in this faith. 
 
 March 16th. — I am passing through a strange expe- 
 rience. Perhaps I have never had stronger proof of my 
 intellectual impotence than in these last weeks, and I 
 
1 14 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 pursue my course as if nothing were the matter ; I am 
 bravely writing numerous articles which are accepted — 
 by what miracle I know not — by a little daily paper. In 
 truth, I know not which most to admire, the excessive 
 kindness of the men who welcome such poor essays, or 
 my incredible assurance in launching such nonsense into 
 the world. Whence comes, then, this extraordinary 
 courage ? Oh ! I can acknowledge to myself the feeling 
 which inspires me ; it is pure, it is praiseworthy, and it 
 so rarely happens that I can look one of my thoughts in 
 the face without lowering my eyes, that I must here 
 record that which gives me an energy so unwonted. I 
 work solely for my father and my friends, all my strength 
 is in them, and it is not I who work, but they who work 
 in me. It is tme that during three years they have 
 urged and spurred me in vain, and that in this was 
 cause for dying of shame and remorse, if my soul could 
 nurse a sentiment — that of repentance, for example — up 
 to some degree of energy. 
 
 22,d. — Oh ! let me hasten to retain here as much as 
 possible of the raptures of this day; let me hasten to 
 write that this day I have enjoyed a sublime happiness, 
 that of a man who has glimpses of the delights of heaven, 
 that I have felt powerful for good, and full of love for 
 God and men. Yes, I must hasten to write it, for these 
 noble exaltations last but a short time in my soul, for 
 to-morrow * 
 
 It seems to me intolerable to appear before men 
 other than I appear before God. My severest torment 
 
 * Here there is a blank in the manuscript ; a leaf is wanting. 
 
Journal. 115 
 
 at this moment, is the opinion which superior people 
 entertain of me. It is said that at the last judgment, 
 the secrets of the conscience shall be revealed to the 
 whole universe : I would it might be thus with me from 
 this day, and that the sight of my soul might be exposed 
 to all comers. 
 
 April 20th. — O my note-book, thou art not for me a 
 heap of paper, something insensible, inanimate ; no, 
 thou livest, thou hast a soul, an understanding, love, 
 kindness, compassion, patience, charity, sympathy, pure 
 and unchangeable. Thou art for me what I have not 
 found among men, that tender and devoted being who 
 attaches himself to a feeble and sickly soul, who enfolds 
 it in affection, who alone comprehends its language, 
 divines the thoughts of its heart, sympathizes with its 
 sorrows, partakes of the intoxication of its joys, lets it 
 rest upon his bosom, or, in his turn, leans upon it for 
 rest ; for we bestow upon one we love the greatest con- 
 solation when we take sleep, or repose, leaning upon 
 his breast. I need a love like that, a pitying love. 
 
 There is nothing in me which can excite the love 
 that we see so much of in the world, the love of equal 
 for equal, the love that exists between congenial souls — 
 souls which attract each other, because they have mu- 
 tually recognized each other as great and beautiful, like 
 two stars descrying each other from opposite poles, and 
 moving to a conjunction across the spaces of heaven. To 
 be loved as I am, I must meet a soul willing to incline 
 towards its inferior ; a strong soul that would bend the 
 knee before the feebler, not to worship it, but to serve, 
 to console it, to protect it as one would a sick man ; a 
 soul, in short, gifted with a sensibility as humble as pro- 
 found, which would divest itself of pride, so natural even 
 
1 1 6 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 to love, to bury its heart in an obscure affection, which 
 the world would in no wise comprehend ; to consecrate 
 its life to some weak being, morbid and introspective ; 
 to be content to concentrate all its rays upon a flower 
 without brilliancy, weak and always trembling; which 
 would bestow, indeed, perfumes whose sweetness charms 
 and penetrates, but never those which intoxicate and 
 exalt to the happy delirium of rapture. 
 
 May ist. — Always a burden, always forced to borrow 
 my existence. The lips of the newly-born infant have 
 energy enough to take the breast, and I, in the prime 
 of my youth, have not sufficient vigor to draw my nour- 
 ishment, to imbibe a little life. 
 
 ph. — A soft rain. There was not a breath in the 
 air. The rain was falling quietly, with a monotony which 
 was not without its charm. The foliage bent under the 
 water of heaven, and each drop, as it struck the leaves, 
 imparted to them a little vibration which ceased only to 
 be renewed. It was as if a universal thrill had seized 
 the tufts of verdure, a tremor of delight and joy. The 
 air, saturated with a warm moisture, and laden with all 
 the perfumes of May, induced languor, and surfeited by 
 mere excess of softness and warm odors. 
 
 At present, all my interviews with Nature, that 
 second Consoler of the sorrowful, take place in a little 
 garden in the street Anjou-Saint-Honore, close by Pe- 
 pinibre street. Day before yesterday, in the evening, I 
 had passed my arm round the trunk of a lilac, and was 
 singing softly J. J.'s song : Que le joicr me dure. This 
 touching, melancholy air, my posture, the calm of even- 
 ing, and, more than all, this habit that belongs to my 
 soul of taking up at evening all its sadness, of surround- 
 ing itself with pale clouds towards the end of the day, 
 
Journal, w-j 
 
 threw me back upon the deep, vast consciousness of my 
 misery, of my inner poverty. I saw myself miserable, 
 very miserable, pitiable, and utterly incapable of a 
 future. At the same time, I seemed to hear murmuring, 
 far and high above my head, that world of thought and 
 poetry towards which I so often spring without the 
 power ever to attain to it. I thought of those of my 
 age who have sufficient breadth of wing to reach it, but 
 without jealousy, and as we here below look upon the 
 elect and their bliss. Still my soul burned, panted, 
 struggled against its weakness. There was in it some- 
 thing of the despair, and the fruitless, passionate efforts 
 of those unfortunates who can only dream of love, and, 
 in their dreams, wildly press to their bosom a phantom 
 that scorches. The trunk of the lilac I was straining 
 shook under my arm ; I seemed to feel it move spon- 
 taneously, and all its shuddering leaves uttered a soft 
 sound, which seemed to me like a language, like a murmur 
 of lips which whisper words of consolation. O my lilac, 
 at that moment, I was pressing thee as the sole being in 
 this world against whom I could lean my faltering na- 
 ture, the only one capable of supporting my embraces, 
 and compassionate enough to offer a support to my 
 misery ! How have I repaid thee ? With a few tears 
 that fell upon thy roots ! 
 
 \Wi. — My inward misery increases, I dare no longer 
 look within myself 
 
 2^th. — I shall be blamed, undoubtedly; but is it in 
 my power to express anything except what I feel ? Ex- 
 periences accumulate ; there is no longer room for doubt. 
 I have no refuge but in resignation. I well foresaw, when 
 I put my foot upon the first step of my attempts and 
 efforts, that I should esteem myself happy to meet, after 
 
1 1 8 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 having had recourse to everything, not a foothold of 
 moderate extent, where I could establish my life and 
 breathe at ease, but even a little hole to cower in and 
 keep myself hidden until the end. My expectation has 
 been realized to the letter : I have no shelter but resig- 
 nation, and I run to it in great haste, all trembling and 
 distracted. Resignation ! it is the burrow hollowed be- 
 neath the roots of an old oak, or in the cleft of some 
 rock, which gives shelter to the flying and long-hunted 
 prey. Swiftly it slinks into the dark and narrow open- 
 ing, crouches in the farthest corner, and there, all bent 
 and gathered into itself, its heart throbbing with rapid 
 beats, it hears the far-off baying of the pack, and the 
 cries of the hunters. Here I am in my burrow. But, 
 the danger past, the hunted thing returns to the fields, 
 comes forth again to see the sun and liberty; it goes 
 back joyously to its carpet of wild thyme and of savory 
 herbs, which it had left half-cropped ; it resumes the 
 habits of its wild and wandering life. Grains, vines, 
 copses, shrubberies, flowers, its bed in the tufted grass, 
 or in the moss under a thicket, its naps, its dreams, its 
 vague and sweet existence — all is again its own ; and I, 
 so long in terror, will go forth no more ; I will remain 
 forever burrowing in my subterranean dwelling. Need 
 I complain of this ? Why should I ? In the depths of 
 my hiding-place I find safety, an assured calm, and as 
 much room as my soul needs for its little evolutions. A 
 soft and subtle ray glides in to me, and sheds about as 
 much light as illumines the cell of a bee. Provided only 
 the wind brings me from time to time a few whiffs of 
 wild perfumes, and my ear catches some distant notes 
 of the melodies of Nature, what have I to regret ? Does 
 the spider, swinging at evening on its thread between 
 
Journal. 119 
 
 two leaves, trouble itself about the flight of the eagle, 
 and the wings of all the birds ? And is the imagination 
 of the bird brooding her young, well sheltered in a thicket, 
 troubled with regret for the sports of her liberty, and the 
 gentle undulations of her flight high in air ? I have 
 never had the liberty of the bird, nor has my thought 
 been as joyous as her wings : let me rest in resignation, 
 as the bird in her nest. 
 
 2(ith. — Why vex myself by incessantly asking, What 
 shall I make of my life? I have applied it to many 
 things, and it has taken hold of none ; with an apparent 
 fitness for work, I remain in a useless and passive atti- 
 tude, almost without resource. But who knows if, all 
 superfluous as I seem in society, God does not derive 
 from me some good I know not of — if He has not, with- 
 out my knowledge, endowed me with some virtue, some 
 secret influence over the welfare of men ? Every time 
 that I am haunted by this fatal thought of my useless- 
 ness and my weakness, I will take refuge in this : that 
 Providence finds some good in me, and makes me serve 
 some hidden use, only exacting from me my consent, 
 and a faith in this mission which He has not chosen to 
 reveal to me. By this acquiescence of my will, the im- 
 perceptible good that I do is quickened ; I thereby sow 
 the seeds of merit, which will germinate in secret, and 
 will bloom in heavenly rewards in the fields of a better 
 world. The paths which conduct mortals to heaven are 
 diverse ; some seem to be widely divergent, and, never- 
 theless, meet in a common centre ; each has its windings, 
 its crooks, its mysterious labyrinths. Amid all the roads 
 which men follow, there is, perhaps, a greater number 
 than is generally believed that open into heaven, but I 
 am satisfied that all are difficult. However it may 
 
I20 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 be, I advance, with full confidence, in my own path, 
 which is very dark. This constant thought, that I am 
 ignorant of the good work for which the Lord designs 
 me, will lead me to respect all creatures, to bow before 
 all living things, to conduct myself on the earth as in a 
 temple, where all things fulfil a sacred ministry, where 
 the atoms of dust in the chinks of the pavement are so 
 many priests, whose innumerable legions prostrate them- 
 selves in prayer. 
 
 yune loth. — When I enter upon a subject, my self- 
 love imagines that I am doing wonders, and when I have 
 finished it, I perceive that it is a servile imitation only, 
 made up of odds and ends of color ground on the jDallet 
 of the masters, and coarsely mixed on mine. But why 
 torment myself incessantly with this thought ? I do my 
 best ; I go as far as I can, and care not a whit for what 
 the world may say. This philosophy is of recent date. 
 In the last eight days, I have made great progress in 
 self-denial, resignation, and the mortifying of every self- 
 complacent thought. I have gone back into my little 
 shell, and am striving to make the best of my quarters, 
 with the resolution of leaving it no more. I ridicule my 
 imagination, which, like the tortoise, would fain make 
 excursions in the air ; I insult with impunity my aspira- 
 tions, which, timid as they are, are bursting with spite ; 
 I delight in taunting the magnificent 7ne, which vainly 
 rebels against the spur of this inward sarcasm ; like the 
 scorpion in the furnace, I bite myself, in order that I 
 may sooner die. 
 
 iTfth. — And am I not a laughing-stock, a toy, some- 
 thing that little children follow with their mockery, a 
 being whom the weakest confront, whom the ten-year-old 
 boy crushes with his foot, like the worm trodden under 
 
Journal, i2i 
 
 the wheel, before I can even turn ? All the children I 
 meet seem instinctively to divine the imbecility of my 
 character, and treat me at once as the master his slave. 
 Their first thought, as soon as they see me, is to make 
 sport of me ; to tease me with the innocent malice pecu- 
 liar to their age. I do not resent it : it is natural to 
 them to use for their amusement anything weaker than 
 their weak hands. 
 
 The Park {Eure et Loir), jFune 25///. — How express 
 what I have experienced in again plunging into solitude, 
 a solitude that recalls the country of my sweetest dreams 
 — Brittany? For the country where I now am slopes 
 towards the west, and one breathes here an air which 
 might be an emanation from my good country. The 
 fields wear nearly the same look ; here are the sunken 
 roads, overgrown with grass ; the paths along the wheat 
 fields ; the rustic fences, the patches of furze, broom, and 
 stunted oak : they make excellent butter here, and cider 
 flows abundantly. I enjoy this resemblance, I devote 
 myself to the study of it, I call up a thousand charming 
 memories, which, to my taste, is one of the sweetest pas- 
 times of the soul. However, my restless thought slum- 
 bers not ; it goads me and keeps me always panting, but 
 its stings are less poignant, and less tormenting. Re- 
 lieved from a burden of material cares, which were stifling 
 me, my fancies soar more freely ; but what matter ? There 
 are always cares, doubts, perplexities ; only I will look 
 higher for them, and under a more vague and less material 
 form. They are chimeras of the future, which appear 
 and disappear, searchings into my destiny, brilliant hopes 
 and failures, a chain of all the strange thoughts which 
 can be conceived in a brain little fertile, but always 
 active, in an imagination which believes, and believes 
 6 
 
122 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 not in itself, which lashes and caresses itself, which wel- 
 comes all dreams, all impressions, without resting in any, 
 and is ever in quest of something new. When then 
 shall I subdue it and come down to reason, pure and 
 simple? If I could yield to the wise counsels which 
 come to me from all sides, I would stow away all this 
 rubbish of foolish thoughts, and though divested of my 
 dreams, I would tranquilly follow in the track of other 
 men. 
 
 26th. — The sweetest hospitality, a communion with 
 Nature, to whom I so freely resort, the absence of all re- 
 straint, all thraldom ; the realization of that happiness, 
 half savage, half social, of which I used to dream so 
 ardently in Paris, in my dark, pent-up chamber, — I pos- 
 sess all these blessings, and I cannot wholly abandon my- 
 self to the enjoyment of them. Once here, I fancied I 
 should fall into the half-sleep of a uniform, free, and natural 
 life ; but how little I know myself, if I hope to taste any- 
 where full repose, and to be lulled by the sweet sound of 
 the harmony that one hears within him when all parts of 
 the soul are in accord ! My faculties, intellectual as well 
 as moral, are too ill-balanced ever to attain to an equi- 
 librium ; I am here sheltered from every external shock. 
 Freed from the tumult of society, beyond the reach of 
 those blows which, v/hen I live in the turmoil of the 
 world, wound me, irritate me, or overwhelm me wholly, 
 good order would resume its sway within me if my trouble 
 came altogether from the side of society. Society has 
 much to do with it — I know it by the great feeling of relief 
 that I experience whenever I withdraw from it ; but the 
 nature of my soul also has a large share in it, as solitude 
 proves to me as soon as I return to it. Then certain 
 uneasy, restless powers awake and excite, for my torment. 
 
Journal i 23 
 
 the faculty of bitter suffering — the rancor, the intense spite, 
 the insensate wrath, which abates and is soothed under 
 the powerful charm of the country. The grateful sensations 
 which flock about me in solitude, the animating and 
 absorbing influences of Nature, flatter me and caress the 
 surface of my soul ; but in penetrating to the interior, 
 they become irritants, which increase the power of this 
 dreamy and restless faculty. 
 
 " They are also to the weary and aching soul, what the 
 morning dew is to the flowers half withered by the heats 
 of the preceding day : it revives and refreshes them, but 
 often only to deliver them, yet more sensitive, to the 
 ardors of the mid-day sun." O. L. V. 
 
 jfuly 16th. — I begin to observe within myself some- 
 thing which somewhat softens my private misery, and 
 which will end, perhaps, in raising me in my own eyes. 
 It is the progress of my soul in the love and knowledge 
 of liberty. It was in 183 1 that my heart first leaped at 
 that name. Until that period the weak and sluggish 
 temper of my soul had left me in insensibility and igno- 
 rance of the delights of liberty. My soul at length came to 
 manhood, and the first enthusiasm of this living and 
 powerful faculty bowed before the virgin form of liberty. 
 At twenty-one, she moved my soul as at fourteen a young 
 girl might have disturbed my heart, with sensations 
 wholly new, confused, and deliciously troubled. I passed 
 two years and a half taken up with the timid and vague 
 reveries of a first love, which knov/s not itself and requires 
 little nourishment. But for some months I have ex- 
 perienced violent agitations of soul, and from time to 
 time I feel flashes of a powerful and intoxicating heat 
 pervading my bosom. Careless and wavering dreams 
 assume consistency and take shape in action ; insensibly 
 
124 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 they are transformed into strong, full thoughts. What 
 were formerly floating and luke-warm desires are now 
 ardent thirsts. Instinct has become passion. 
 
 I have arrived at a critical period in my inner life. 
 By a strange stirring of my thoughts, by the almost in- 
 stantaneous growth of more than one faculty within me, 
 by the quickened motion of my inner life, I recognize the 
 approach of a revulsion I have long invoked. Hitherto I 
 have given up to my caprice and to chance the guidance of 
 my faculties ; they seemed so weak and promised so little 
 that I did not judge them worthy of other masters ; but 
 they have agreeably deceived me. These pale, wretched 
 children have taken on vigor and bloom ; uncertain and 
 shrinking in constitution, they have grown bold, and have 
 freed themselves by a quick and sudden spring from the 
 languors of their long infancy. I must begin to think of 
 their destiny. An internal revolution is necessary : I must 
 enter on an active life, and say farewell to my beloved 
 listlessness, sweet companion of my childhood and 
 youth. Alas ! it will not be without tears. At last I 
 must seriously exercise my faculties, and it shall be under 
 the inspiration and the fire of the thought that fills my 
 soul, burning like a passion — the thought of liberty : that 
 is to say, of the greatest happiness and the greatest 
 progress of humanity. I shall only be an ant bringing 
 a straw to the building up of the future ; but however small 
 my forces, they will none the less be animated by a great 
 and holy thought, which never allows the soul it dwells 
 in to falter, which purifies, enlarges it, and suffices for 
 its happiness, a thought which belongs to all and of 
 which every one is proud ; the thought which drives the 
 age before it : the most beautiful after that of God, the 
 thought of liberty. 
 
JournaL 125 
 
 When I go out to walk in a pleasant mood and free 
 from all care, I feel dawning in the depth of my soul an 
 unwonted, a singularly lively joy. The farther I go into 
 the country, it rises and diffuses itself, now rapidly, now 
 slowly, according to the incidents by the way and the 
 time it takes to reach the finest part of the walk. Once 
 there and established to my liking, and always in a way 
 to receive most vividly on all sides impressions from the 
 surrounding horizon, this growing feeling of indefinable 
 delight attains its fulness, diffuses itself through my being, 
 and fills it to overflowing. 
 
 August 4th. — Paris is about to take possession of me 
 once more, but it will find me stronger, more courageous, 
 in better condition in every way, to support the pressure 
 of life. During the six weeks spent here without study, 
 without exertion, letting my soul wander at will, living in 
 idleness, but in a contemplative idleness open to all im- 
 pressions, I have made great progress. What does my 
 intellect need to enrich and enlarge it. Books ? persistent 
 labor ? profound researches in science ? No. A free life, 
 a country which wraps me in verdure and warm emana- 
 tions, through which I walk now impetuous and hurried, 
 now quiet and loitering, and all the light, the clouds, the 
 ravishing sounds and the universal rapture which revolve 
 around a man who spends whole days leaning against a 
 tree and occupied solely with observing the life of 
 Nature. Under these conditions, my mind has been 
 placed, and the very»sap of its being, warmed by the 
 potent atmosphere which surrounded it, has gushed forth 
 in a mighty stream. I have seen many clouds detach 
 themselves from the mass of darkness which weighs upon 
 my soul, and which has only lately been stirred by the 
 breath of my new-Born intelligence. Every day I throw 
 
126 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 off some prejudice. The love of liberty is taking 
 possession of my character and is beginning to lay in it 
 the foundation of a solid and rational independence, 
 ^hich confirms me in myself, and prepares for me powers 
 of resistance against the rude shocks of that combat so 
 ingeniously arranged and planned, — called society. I 
 will plunge into the melee ; I know not against whom I 
 shall jostle ; but I am well assured that bruises and 
 wounds will rain upon me. What matter ? I am discon- 
 certed by a mere nothing, a breath upsets me, a child 
 tyrannizes over my timidity ; what then will happen when 
 my life is bound up with that of men all bristling with 
 prejudices, proud and absolute in their servile, narrow, 
 inflated opinions, their hands always ready to strangle 
 the weak ? The result will be that they will disturb my 
 timid nature, that they will make me suffer horribly in 
 the weak and unfortified regions of my soul ; but their 
 darts will not pierce elsev/here. While from appearances 
 'they reckon me vanquished, my soul, in its inner temple of 
 independence, will lovingly press to its bosom its free 
 and generous opinions, its faith, emancipated from all the 
 petty chains with which it is loaded by many a man, who 
 says to me : " Leave there those men and their sayings, 
 and steep thyself once more in the memory of the days 
 of freedom, when thou wast wont to wander at will through 
 the fields, the heart swelling with delight, and loudly 
 chanting hymns to liberty; when thou enjoyedst a day all 
 idleness from beginning to end — from the gay breezes of 
 morning to the warm perfumes of evening, lying under a 
 pear-tree, careless of everthing, and bidding defiance, in 
 thy mocking ease, to the tyrants of all kinds fastened like 
 vultures to the side of humanity." 
 
 Paris, August 20th. — To leave solitude for the crowd ; 
 
Journal, 1 27 
 
 the green ways, and the sohtary, for the obstructed streets 
 with their clamors, where instead of a breeze circulates a 
 current of warm, tainted human breath ; to pass from quiet- 
 ism to turbulent life, and from the vague mysteries of Na- 
 ture to the harsh reality of society, has ever been a terrible 
 change for me, a return to evil and misfortune. As I go 
 on my way, and advance in the discernment of the true 
 and false in society, my inclination to live, — not as a 
 savage nor a misanthrope, but as a solitary man on the 
 confines of society, on the borders of the world, — is 
 strengthened and extended. The birds flutter, pilfer, 
 build their nests about our dwellings, they are like 
 fellow-citizens of tlie farms and hamlets ; but they fly in 
 the sky, which is immense ; the hand of God alone dis- 
 tributes and measures out to them the day's food ; they 
 build their nests in the heart of the thickets, or hang 
 them on the tops of the trees. Thus I would wish to 
 live, hovering about society, and having always behind 
 me a field of liberty, vast as the heavens. If my faculties 
 are not yet formed, if it is true that they have not at- 
 tained their growth, they will develop only in the open 
 air and under a somewhat wild exposure. My last 
 sojourn in the country has confirmed my conviction on 
 this point. 
 
 During my six weeks' vacation, I have lain fallow 
 in the most complete inaction. Scarcely, to break the 
 uniformity of the far niente^ did I pursue some lazy read- 
 ing, stretched under a tree, and more than half my atten- 
 tion distracted by a breeze, or a bird threading its way 
 through the woods, by the song of a blackbird, a skylark, or 
 what not, by all that passes in the air that is vague and en- 
 chanting for a man lying on the fresh turf, under the 
 shade of a tree, in the midst of a country thrilling with 
 
128 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 life and sunlight. But this repose, this accabnie^ had not 
 destroyed the play of my faculties nor arrested the myste- 
 rious circulation of thought in the most vital part of my 
 soul. I was like a man under the spell of a magnetic 
 sleep : his eyes are closed, his limbs relaxed, all his sen- 
 ses sealed ; but, under that veil which covers almost all 
 the phenomena of physical life, his soul is much more 
 alive than in a waking state of natural activity ; it pierces 
 the thick darkness, beyond which it sees certain mysteries 
 laid bare, or enjoys the sweetest visions ; it communes 
 with apparitions ; to it the gates of a wonderful world are 
 opened. I tasted two pleasures at once, one of which 
 alone would have sufficed to fill my being to overflowing, 
 and yet both found place and expanded freely without 
 clashing or confusion. I enjoyed both at once and each 
 as distinctly as if I had possessed but one ; no confusion, 
 no mingling, no marring of the vivacity of the one by the 
 activity of the other. The first consisted of the unspeak- 
 able sentiment of a repose perfect, continuous, and verg- 
 ing on slumber ; the second came to me from the pro- 
 gressive, harmonized, slowly-cadenced movement of the 
 inmost faculties of my soul, which expanded in a world 
 of dreams and thoughts, which, I believe, was a sort of 
 vision — in vague and evanescent shadows — of the most 
 secret beauties of Nature, and of her divine forces. 
 When the hour of departure broke the charm, and I re- 
 sumed the habitual sentiment of my being, I found myself 
 poor and forlorn as before -, but by the more animated 
 march of my thoughts, by a more subtile delicacy of sen- 
 sation, by a marked dilatation of my moral and intellec- 
 tual forces, I knew that my six weeks of idleness were 
 not lost, that the flow of strange dreams which had flood- 
 ed my soul had uplifted and borne it to a higher level. 
 
Journal. 129 
 
 I came back to society with this joy, amply set off, how- 
 ever, and almost deadened by the sadness of my heart, 
 which came back heavy with regrets and languor. I 
 parted from the country as from a sweetheart, and I con- 
 fess that I cannot explain the astonishing resemblance of 
 the sadness she has left me, to that of love. 
 
 22d. — I have received a letter from Onesime ; as I 
 opened it, a perfume of flowers and of the country issued 
 from all its folds. At first, I thought it enclosed one of 
 those breezes which flutter about all day in the meadows 
 and gardens j but I soon changed my mind when, on 
 turning the page, I scattered over the floor blue and 
 yellow petals, rose leaves and blades of grass. There 
 were people in the parlor ; I blushed, I was confused ; I 
 thought they were about to question me, perhaps ridicule 
 what gave me so much pleasure. I should not have 
 known what to answer, I should have faltered, I should 
 have been embarrassed in my speech. And then, more- 
 over, how is it possible to make foreign natures under- 
 stand the value of a blade of grass in a letter, the charm 
 of this touching childishness, of this exquisite simplicity ? 
 Happily, no one took notice ; they were talking ; I let it 
 pass and made haste to pick up my treasure by stealth, 
 like a thief. Society, such as it has become, has so 
 altered men and destroyed in them the native instincts 
 of the soul, that those who have escaped the general 
 contagion and preserved in its purity the simplicity of 
 natural tastes, are forced to hide themselves, to steal 
 away, to envelop themselves in a sort of modesty. 
 
 26//^. — My soul shrinks and recoils upon itself like 
 
 a leaf touched by the cold ; it retires to its own centre, 
 
 it has abandoned all the positions from which it looked 
 
 out. After some days of struggle against social realities, 
 
 6* 
 
I JO Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 I was obliged to fall back and retire within. Here I am 
 circumscribed and blockaded until my thought, swollen 
 by a new inundation, rises above the dike and flows 
 freely over all its banks. I know of few events of my in- 
 ternal life so formidable for me as this sudden contraction 
 of my being after extreme expansion. In this condensa- 
 tion, the most active faculties, the most unquiet, the most 
 restless elements, find themselves seized and condemned 
 to inaction, but without paralysis, without decrease of 
 vitality ; all their impetuosity is shut in, and under con- 
 straint. Pressed and crowded they struggle against 
 each other, and all together against their barrier. At 
 these times all the feeling of life I have, is reduced to a 
 deep, dull irritation alternating with paroxysms ; it is the 
 fermentation of so many various elements becoming in- 
 flamed and exasperated by their forced contact, and 
 making repeated efforts to burst forth. All the faculties 
 which brought me into communication with the outside, 
 the distant world — all those brilliant and faithful messen- 
 gers of the soul which go and come continually from the 
 soul to Nature and from Nature to the soul — finding 
 themselves pent within, I remain isolated, cut off from 
 all participation in the universal life. I am become like 
 an infirm man, deficient in all his senses, solitary, and 
 excommunicated from Nature. 
 
 September "jth. — In conversation I pass for nothing. 
 I commonly derive from it only discomfiture and bitter- 
 ness. In conversation I compromise my inner life, 
 whatever is best in me. To sustain the flow of talk, I 
 throw into it my cherished thoughts, those I love most 
 dearly and prize with the greatest tenderness. My timid 
 and faltering speech disfigures, mutilates them, throws 
 them into the broad light of day disordered, confused, 
 
Journal, 131 
 
 half-clothed. When I withdraw, I gather together and 
 lock up my scattered treasure, but I put away my 
 ideals sorely handled, like fruits fallen from the tree 
 upon stones. 
 
 <^th. — At this moment there is a mingling in my soul, 
 a mingling of bitter and sweet, a confusion of honey and 
 gall, a strange medley. For some days, my mind, still 
 so little regulated, has been seized with a feverish rest- 
 lessness, which makes it go and come from pole to pole, 
 which will not allow it to settle and repose in the 
 centre of an order of ideas or beliefs, but carries it 
 rapidly from region to region, and, in passing, holds it 
 suspended over all abysses. I taste a strange delight 
 in feeling my soul snatched up, like that prophet that an 
 angel carried away by the hair, and traversing vast 
 regions with frightful rapidity. But what do I bring 
 back from these wild v/anderings ? Lassitude, bewilder- 
 ment, an access of giddiness, and yet, beneath all that, 
 a secret self-satisfaction which takes pride in the fiery 
 voyage, and unconsciously stirs the growing passion of 
 my soul for these perilous adventures. In the country, 
 also, in the mild days, the ravisher came to take my 
 soul ; together they went far away, but with a more 
 measured flight and through regions more serene, though 
 no- less vague and shifting : as to-day, my soul, on its 
 return, knew no longer what to think of things, but in 
 its perplexity there was less of disturbance, less of un- 
 easy pre-occupation. 
 
 19//Z. — O truth! appearest thou not at times to me 
 like a luminous phantom behind a cloud ? But the first 
 wind dispels thee. Can it be that thou art only an illu- 
 sion before the eye of the soul ? Reason and faith ! 
 When these two words shall make but one, the enigma 
 
132 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 of this world will be solved. Meanwhile, what is to be 
 done ? As I write, the sky is magnificent. Nature ex- 
 hales fresh breezes full of life, the world rolls on melo- 
 diously, and amid all these harmonies wanders a sad 
 and startled thing — the mind of man — disturbed by all 
 this order, which he comprehends not. 
 
 "^Tst. — After all, what is our business here below? 
 To lead a useful life. That setded, what matter what 
 instrument God puts into a man's hands to improve the 
 time, pen or hammer? To accept without hesitation 
 every situation to which the power of my soul or of my 
 hands is adequate — such is the resolution to which my 
 soul clings, seeing that all takes flight and vanishes 
 around it; seeing that the earth crumbles under my 
 feet. But can I rely upon a resolution of my soul? 
 Who will assure me of its constancy, after a thousand 
 fluctuations, after a thousand projects formed, aban- 
 doned, re-formed? I lose myself; my sluggish and 
 indiflerent will breathlessly pursues my soul, which 
 takes the wings of the most delicate dreams, of the 
 most fleeting illusions. Such is my life : it is composed 
 of serious plans, which are always changing ; of vain 
 dreams, which are permanent ; of long intoxications of 
 the imagination, and of ridiculous scenes between my 
 will and my soul, unfettered and swift of flight as a 
 savage ; and in the quick and core of my life, ever the 
 acute suffering or the dull uneasiness, as the disorder 
 increases or decreases. 
 
 26^.-1 accept with a passive resignation the recoil 
 of the hopes I have sent forth. I begin to care little 
 enough for the course of my external life and for any 
 IDleasure, more or less, I may meet in my path. When I 
 have bread for my hunger, and water for my thirst, I, 
 
Journal, 133 
 
 more than any other, ought to be content and silent. 
 Idle and altogether superfluous in society, I have no 
 right, in the common distribution, to any but the portion 
 vigorously necessary to the support of my life. 
 
 2W1. — The elements are confounded within and with- 
 out. An immense chaos, Nature, men, science, the 
 universality of things rolls its waves against my soul lost 
 in the foam and roar like an isolated point, a rock in the 
 midst of the sea =i^ * # # * # 
 I sustain the shock of a boundless surge ; how long shall 
 I hold firm ? If I bury myself in your bosom, myste- 
 rious waves, will it be with me as with those knights who, 
 drawn down to the bottom of the lakes, found marvellous 
 palaces there, or, like the fisherman in the fable, in falling 
 into the sea, shall I become a god "i 
 
 I formerly doubted myself, who am an imperceptible 
 point. The doubt at first confined to this imperceptible 
 point, has broken its barriers, it covers the world ; an 
 atom has expanded over the entire universe. I used to 
 suffer only in myself, now I suffer in all things. 
 
 29//^. — The germinating grain puts forth life in two 
 contrary directions, the plumule grows upward, the root- 
 let downward : I would like to be the insect that takes 
 up its quarters and lives in the rootlet. I would take 
 my post at the extreme tip of the roots and watch the 
 powerful action of the pores drawing in life ; I would 
 observe the life passing from the fruitful bosom of some 
 earthy atom into the pores, which, like so many mouths, 
 evoke and woo it by melodious calls. I would be witness 
 of the ineffable love with which life rushes to the arms of 
 the being who invokes it, and of the joy of that being. I 
 would be present at their embraces. 
 
 October 22d. — For three weeks, I have lived an outer 
 
134 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 life, which devours all my days, even to the crumbs : a 
 revolution in my habits, a sudden transition from the 
 carelessness of dreams to the breathlessness of action. 
 All this stir of bustling life absorbs a certain portion of 
 my thought, but it is a floating portion, that I abandon to 
 every wind, like the stray folds of a cloak. I do not feel 
 its loss. These thoughts are the waves that come up on 
 the strand : the land drinks of them, man dabbles in 
 them, the sea abandons them to any who desire them. 
 Thus my life, on its borders, is taken up with the cares 
 and anxieties of active life ; but on the broad surface, 
 nothing touches it, no one draws from it, its waves lose 
 nothing except through the continual evaporation of their 
 waters, breathed upon by an unknown power. 
 
 November 2.-7yd. — Two months of action, of participa- 
 tion in human weariness. But in bending to my work, 
 in digging out the furrow where I have just sown the first 
 sweat of my brow, the lassitude I have felt has been only 
 physical. My soul comes back from its day's work with 
 the freshness of an awakening. It is not long since it 
 shuddered and fainted wdien the thought of an external 
 action to be accomplished passed before it. If, at the 
 moment when necessity urged me with its lash into the 
 melee of men of action, like those oriental soldiers who 
 are driven to battle with whips — if, I say, at that moment, 
 my soul had found itself hovering on the brink of action, 
 it would have recoiled and fallen. Happily, a little be- 
 fore this moment, it had started on a course which must 
 carry it far from the battle-fields of action. This depar- 
 ture was not sudden nor undesigned ; breaths which had 
 inspired my soul from time to time, like the first freshness 
 of a breeze, had given token of its new direction. In due 
 time it set out ; behold it out of danger. Joyous as cap- 
 
Journal. 135 
 
 tives who with vigorous oars leave behind them a barbar- 
 ous coast, it leaps eagerly along its flight, it withdraws 
 itself to regions unknown to all and to itself, but it is 
 sure to reach them, because they attract, and an infallible 
 presentiment of the wonders they reserve for it, entertains 
 it on the way. 
 
 December lotk. — Of what nature am I, then, that new 
 conditions against which I can make no preparation, are 
 continually coming upon me, that at each moment is re- 
 vealed some new infirmity in some quarter where I had 
 no anxiety ? To-day this poor imagination by which I live 
 habitually, whence flows all that circulating life in me of 
 unknown joys and of those hidden transports of which 
 nothing goes forth to be wasted on the outer world, — this 
 poor imagination is drained. It will be eight days since 
 my inner life began to diminish, the stream to fall, low- 
 ered by so perceptible a decrease that, after only a few 
 days' exposure to the sun of this work-a-day world, it has 
 become a little thread of water. To-day I have seen the 
 last drop vanish. 
 
 I take in its broadest sense the word imagination : 
 it is for me the name of the inner life, the general appel- 
 lation of the finest faculties of the soul, of those which 
 reclothe tangible ideas with imaginative adornment, as 
 likewise of those which, turned towards the infinite, are 
 perpetually meditating the intangible, and shaping the 
 invisible into images of unknown origin and indescribable 
 form. This talk is a little metaphysical and widely at 
 variance with the known psychologies ; but, for that 
 matter, I trouble myself little about men and the arrange- 
 ments they have made of our faculties ; their systems, 
 which shackle me, I break, and, thus free, go as far from 
 them as possible, to reconstruct a soul and a world to my 
 liking. 
 
136 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 i 
 I certainly cannot believe that our most living facul- 
 ties die like a flickering torch, and that all the interior 
 sources of inspiration close suddenly, as if struck by a 
 curse. But it is undeniable that the life of the soul is 
 interrupted, that the stream of secret joys suspends its 
 course to give passage to swarms of bitternesses and un- 
 known desolations. I suffer from this terrible invasion. 
 I listen within myself, and I hear no more what used to 
 I charm me. Various subtle murmurings, undulating har^ 
 / monies of distant choirs, reverberations of the secret songs I 
 I of Nature, all this flow of gentle sound has ceased." 
 '^Like a man who walks in the night provided with a torch, 
 objects seemed, as I advanced, to take on a brilliancy at 
 once vivid and soft, and, in this light, all forms, toned as 
 well as sharpened, seemed to bathe as in their native 
 element, and to taste I know not what delights, which ani^ 
 mated their countenance, and gave to them beauties hith-j 
 erto unseen. To-day I cast only a shadow, every form is! 
 opaque and struck with death. As in a walk in the night,t 
 I advance with the consciousness of my forlorn existence,! 
 amid the lifeless phantoms of all things. 
 
 My inner life resembles that circle of the hell of Dante, 
 
 where a crowd of souls rush on in the train of a standard 
 
 borne rapidly forward. The multitude of my thoughts, 
 
 like the crowd of shades, swift, tumultuous, silent, is borne 
 
 ceaselessly toward a fatal phantom, an undulating and 
 
 luminous form, of irresistible attraction, which flees with 
 
 the swiftness of an uncreated apparition. False guide, 
 
 without doubt, for its flight is too alluring not to draw my 
 
 soul into some cruel snare ; but, whatever may happen, -x 
 
 ^ I yield to the lure. Like a child travelling, my mind > 
 
 } smiles incessantly at the beautiful regions itsees within \ 
 
 / itself, and will never see elsewhere. I dwell with the ^ 
 
h(^ 
 
 -^ JournaL 137 
 
 interior elements of things, I climb the rays of the stars, 
 and the current of the streams, to the very bosom of the 
 mysteries of their generation. I am admitted by Nature 
 t(5 the inner sanctuary of her sacred abodes, to the point 
 whence issues Life Universal \ there, I detect the cause 
 of motion, and I hear the first song of created life in all 
 its freshness. Who has not caught himself watching the 
 shadows of the summer clouds gliding over the land- 
 scape } As I write, I am doing some such thing. I see 
 moving over this paper the shadow of my fancies, like 
 scattered flakes, ever swept before the wind. Such is 
 the nature of my thoughts, and of all my intellectual 
 stores — a little floating vapor just ready to vanish. But 
 even as the air delights in condensing the exhalations 
 from the waters, and in peopling itself with beautiful 
 clouds, my imagination seizes the emanations of my 
 soul, heaps them up, moulds them at will, and lets them 
 drift along the current of that secret breath which per- 
 vades all intelligences. This is the happiness inherent 
 in my nature, an ethereal, evanescent happiness, which 
 often melts under my kisses, and dissolves in my em- 
 braces. Moreover, neither my serenity nor my torment 
 is of long duration \ alas ! nor are my resolutions lasting. 
 Whatever of philosophy or of practical reason there may 
 be in my soul, groans and suflers. Like a ship that has 
 spread too much canvas, I hold a wild, blind course 
 through life, sustaining at every hour the tnost cruel 
 damages. 
 
 In a picture, we love, we admire the features of the 
 unknown man, of the shepherd, it may be, dreaming on 
 the mountain. He represents intelligence in the midst 
 of creation, the deep, sonorous echo in the centre of 
 melodies, the divine mirror athwart the path of the in- 
 
138 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 numerable images which Gtod has set in motion from the 
 . uncreated void, a floating garb of symbols which we 
 h name the Universe. The real personages, the shepherd 
 ij and I, are poor creatures who see the clouds floating, 
 ^= and hear the wind whistling by mere instinct, and as a 
 , pastime of solitude. 
 
 ^ Jaimary 26th, 1835. — I ^^^^e acted my little drama 
 under your eyes ; you have followed its changes, and 
 heard its noise with a tender interest which has been the 
 source of all my courage. And yet, what did you look 
 at? What one follows with the eye on summer even- 
 ings : a winged insect that whirls and spins in the air, 
 with a light buzzing of its wings. Like the insect, my 
 thought madly drives a fitful flight which goes no whither. 
 I have acquired philosophy enough to walk resolutely in 
 the practical life, and to raise myself above certain attacks 
 which would formerly have overthrown me. But the con- 
 trol of my thought does not belong to me. It has no 
 other guide than an untiring instinct of flight, far from 
 the common abode, as if liberty was to be found in 
 escape, and truth at the end of an endless journey. 
 Moreover, notwithstanding the smoothing of the ways 
 in my interior life, I feel scarcely any less weariness of 
 life ; for restlessness of thought is as good, or as bad, as 
 uncertainty of the morrow. Poetry dwells no more in 
 my soul, I no longer enjoy its familiar intercourse ; by 
 the absence of a sweet burden, by the chilling of my 
 habits of imagination, I know that she has departed, and 
 besides, I hear her voice afar off", at a high pitch, but 
 already faint and almost annihilated by the distance. 
 Sometimes I think she calls me, having found beyond 
 the darkness a better place than this ; for, to-day, I hope 
 everything from the side of the impenetrable, and some- 
 
Journal. 139 
 
 times she seems to be bidding me good-by. For the 
 rest, what matters it, if what we call imagination, poesy, 
 leaves or takes me ? That can neither retard nor hasten 
 the course of my destiny j and whether or not I may have 
 foreseen it here below, I shall none the less some day 
 behold what is reserved for me. Ought I not rather, 
 ignoring all these anxieties, to apply myself to enlarging 
 my positive knowledge, and to prefer the least luminous 
 thread of certain truth, to the vague glimmers in which 
 I am lost ? A man who is sure of any mathematical 
 truth whatever, is more advanced in the comprehension 
 of the true, than the most beautiful imagination. He 
 has acquired an inviolable possession in the domain of 
 knowledge, where he can dwell to all eternity. The 
 poet is driven from exile to exile, and will never have 
 any certain abode. 
 
 February 2d. — We lost Marie the 2 2d of January, 
 at nine o'clock in the evening. 
 
 After the happiness of dying before those one loves, 
 I know of nothing which better indicates the favor of 
 heaven than to be admitted to the pillow of a dying 
 friend, to follow as far as one can with him into the 
 shadow of death, partially to enter into the profound 
 mystery in which he vanishes, to take from his counte- 
 nance faithful and incorruptible impressions ; in short, 
 to gather a treasure of sad and secret thoughts, which 
 may last through the longest life. 
 
 All this I have seen only under the representation 
 that the soul pictures to itself, as it best can, of that 
 which takes place far from us. Poor Marie ! I have 
 imagined the spectacle of your end ; I have contem- 
 plated eagerly, through the shadows of this terrible 
 dream, all that transpired between you and death; I 
 
140 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 have seen your calm and peaceful features, your sweet- 
 ness and the beauty of your soul yet visible upon your 
 lips, and undimmed by suffering. This vision is some- 
 times disturbed, and disappears, but it soon returns ; for, 
 swayed by a potent spell, I call it back. In its longest 
 absences, it gives place to another sight, unclouded by 
 the shadows of death : Marie appears to me with vague 
 and indistinct features, floats before my imagination, 
 and, without touching the earth, guides me to the haunts 
 she loved, in which we have so often wandered to- 
 gether. 
 
 She has vanished from the visible world ; she be- 
 longs to the regions of thought j she is accessible only 
 to that powerful faculty which rises from our souls to the 
 spiritual abodes, climbs to them secretly in the shadow, 
 and descends accompanied by a sweet phantom. How 
 often have our dreams mounted together to those dim 
 and obscure dwellings which attracted us by their mys- 
 tery ! How many times have they gone to knock lightly 
 at the gates of that world of intelligences and pure 
 spirits ! And now thou art mingled, absorbed in this 
 ocean of spiritual life ! By the same process as of yore, 
 my thought now enshrines thee in its bosom ; it pic- 
 tures thee as of the same essence with those sweet 
 dreams of mine which used to meet thine and together 
 seek the same heaven. 
 
 I try to understand this — to reconcile the thought 
 which seeks her on earth with that which seeks her here 
 no longer. I re-form painfully the habits of my imagi- 
 nation which used to travel with so much delight towards 
 the beloved wilderness ; I am forced at every moment to 
 turn it from its way, to put it on the new path it must 
 henceforth take ; — strange and bitter confusion of two 
 
Journal, 141 
 
 worlds, terrible disturbance of the soul following after 
 that soul which has changed its abode ! But no ; I am 
 happy to gaze in the direction where she has vanished, 
 to carry all my communings, all my aspirations, towards 
 the invisible world, which has snatched her from us. 
 Who will make me a sharer in the treasured thoughts 
 gathered at the final hour ? Who will admit me to those 
 mysteries in which I would fain wrap myself forever ? I 
 am hungry for sorrow, and for that mournful knowledge* 
 
 9//^. — The work is finished ; doubt no longer trou- 
 bles j I am convinced. I have again clothed with 
 mourning that charming scene in my recollections. The 
 sweet countenance whose outlines trembled faintly in my 
 memory, — for time and absence spread over the most 
 cherished features a sort of vapor which partially dims 
 and confuses them, — the sweet countenance has resumed 
 its place before my eyes ; but my imagination, like 
 death, has veiled it with pallor, has touched the lips with 
 a dying rose-tint, and closed the eyes forever. I have 
 broken the image of its earthly existence, I have effaced 
 it from the external world. Ideas have changed places ; 
 an actual life, in its completeness, has been taken from 
 my soul, and I see coming, instead, the incorruptible 
 images and forms of the unknown world which lies about 
 us. I press lovingly to my heart and scan closely these 
 new apparitions which wear beloved features. I invoke 
 Divine aid that I may gather to my side as many as pos- 
 sible of these secret guests to whom grief hastens 
 
 * Following this fragment, a leaf has been detached from the 
 original manuscript, and several lines on the top of the next page 
 have been effaced. 
 
142 Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 eagerly, confirmed in its infatuation by tliem. Still, the 
 sense of the terrible blow is not softened ; in vain the 
 spirit retires into the shadow to sigh apart and give no 
 outward sign ; it is oppressed by the necessity of tears. 
 Then, if my eyes refuse, I say, like Hippolyte : Thou no 
 longer weepest ; thou recallest, then, no more the happy 
 days of a year ago with Marie ? 
 
 12th. — Of which world shall we dream? What se- 
 cret beauties of Nature can attract and fix the mind 
 more powerfully than the regions in which Marie has 
 vanished ? I know she is there — that the shadows of 
 the world of spirits conceal her from us. How attrac- 
 tive have these shadows become, and what a charm for 
 me in attempting the approaches to this unknown world ! 
 I advance ; I imagine, as I can, the abode of the pure 
 spirit ; I strive to figure to myself a soul restored to its 
 element, the secrets of its new life, and all the details of 
 its immortal condition. The imagination, carrying its 
 earthly habits into its dreams, clothes the beloved spirit 
 in a form, and I see Marie with the features of this 
 world renewed in heaven. But often, in the very crea- 
 tion of these sweet phantoms, grief, dispelled for a mo- 
 ment, revives j it rushes upon me from the midst of the 
 most soothing visions. — She has become, then, only a 
 thought, I say to myself ; she is, then, accessible only to 
 the dreams of my soul ! I resign myself reluctantly to 
 the heavy, human sadness of this idea. Sometimes I 
 escape from it by beginning again the pilgrimage of 
 memories. The light and noiseless steps of my imagi- 
 nation tread again the loved paths. Like Paul, wander- 
 ing in his island, I return, led by an inevitable attrac- 
 tion, to the scene of the shipwreck. — Some days ago, I 
 found, in a library, when I was alone, a book from which 
 
JournalCA^ ^- 143 
 
 we had read in some of our long social evenings. I 
 opened it. How express what was suggested by it, 
 and the vividness of the memories which slumbered 
 in those lines, as in furrows ? How many tears I 
 shed over this good Collin d'Harleville, so gay, so 
 charming ! Thus everything is turned to mourning. 
 Return, all ye memories, sweet emanations of the 
 past, shadows of what has vanished, come back into my 
 soul, as, at nightfall, the little birds and the bees, which 
 have wandered far over the fields, fly back and gather to 
 their haunts. Return all ; night has fallen. — Thus I 
 give relief to the intense regrets which no consolation 
 may dare to approach. I surround them v/ith this mur- 
 muring multitude of memories. They listen to their 
 mingled voices, and study their features, varied by a 
 thousand shades of meaning ; the tumultuous flow of 
 painful thoughts by degrees slackens, and for a time 
 subsides, so far as to become a languid stream of melan- 
 choly. 
 
 March 24//^. — Formerly my grief dissolved in tears ; 
 it has become barren. The bitter waves held in solution 
 some drops of balm ; to-day, the pure liquid leaves me 
 no sweet deposit, to sip with secret lingering. 
 
 I used to picture the soft and tender gleams of twi- 
 light to be sweet and beneficent particles deposited by 
 the stream of burning light which had just flooded the 
 heavens. And with a profound delight I used to watch 
 the sky deepening into that ethereal yellow whose de- 
 licious melancholy gave it an air of repose. What 
 passed at sunset I used to trace in myself at the same 
 hour, and the evening and I sank to sleep with the same 
 soothing of grief 
 
 O quieting sweetness of these tranquil pageants, sym- 
 
144 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 pathies of my soul with the spirit of natural scenery, 
 whither have ye fled ? I am alone. I no longer feel nor 
 experience anything but my life. The sharpness of an 
 existence profoundly perturbed by a thousand internal 
 poisons — such is the sole flavor of my days. 
 
 2']th. — I know well that, with resolution and effort, 
 I might succeed in moulding my mind to a severe logic, 
 to a certain regular management of my faculties, to the 
 consecutive study of useful truths. But I have received 
 so little power of deduction, so little method and logical 
 comprehension, that it will always be a feeble and sickly 
 labor. 
 
 Calmness in the thoughts indicates the force of the 
 intellect. But all my efforts are only creations without re- 
 sult, convulsive, breaking off abruptly at every minute, like 
 the speech of a madman. I lose myself; a direful dis- 
 turbance unsettles my brain ; the vivacity of certain ideas 
 intoxicates it ; confused with I know not what imagin- 
 ings, it falls to the ground. But of what use is com- 
 plaint? If I were a laborer, perhaps I should accuse 
 the weakness of my arms, and the rapid exhaustion of 
 my breath. I have never in my life turned up a clod, 
 and I am easy on that score. If, limiting the labor of 
 my intellect to what my condition requires, I had not 
 put its strength to full proof, I should be easy in that 
 quarter also. But it is done ; the shortest way is to 
 take comfort. Why not also reascend the current of 
 habit, and thus reenter into the primitive calm ? Let 
 me forever close the outlet, foolishly opened to the secret 
 waves within my soul ! Let them sleep there ! These 
 waves — they are only a few drops; surely I need not 
 fear their storms. 
 
 If I have still some steps to take here below, I would 
 
Journal, 145 
 
 like to take them in quiet. I know neither whence I am, 
 nor whither I am going. I must at least walk tranquilly 
 in the peace of an ignorance which will not long wait to 
 be enlightened. True wisdom consists in enduring what 
 cannot last. 
 
 There is more strength and beauty in the well-kept 
 secret of oneself and one's thoughts, than in the unfold- 
 ing of a whole heaven that one may have within. Thus 
 was it with Marie ; the wealth and sweetness of her soul 
 revealed themselves only by the charm of her words, and 
 the peaceful enchantment which her existence shed about 
 her. It is not that I am discouraged. Although I am 
 still subject to certain returns of this old infirmity, I 
 have subdued it so far that it no longer impedes the posi- 
 tive progress of my life. The nature of my intellect, 
 eager and restless, and in no way gifted for the strong 
 and severe operations of reasoning, forbids all hope of 
 a suitable progress in the philosophy of this world. But 
 this class of investigation taken away, I see nothing 
 worthy an effort of thought. Consequently, when I 
 shall have acquired enough ordinary knowledge to im- 
 part, during my life, to little boys, I must be content. 
 I shall then have my share of knowledge. This is a 
 very contracted and small ambition. But for a man 
 like me, who has not in his heart energy enough to pro- 
 duce a simple will-o'-the-wisp of passion, and who, in the 
 matter of intellect, has just enough to cause an unproduc- 
 tive excitement, is not the little, the best, — that little which 
 suffices to relieve from want his material life ? And for 
 the rest, one may set about canvassing men and things 
 leisurely, contentedly, with a little dreaming, if one 
 wishes, but with the consciousness of a profound igno- 
 rance of the impenetrable destiny which impels us. 
 7 
 
146 Maurice de Gucrin, 
 
 April yl. — The moral expanse which my life em- 
 braces, is like a desert under a colorless, immovable 
 sky, without variation of seasons. Its temperature is 
 sufficiently warm to have induced a certain fermentation 
 in the fertile soil : but, as it preserves eternally the same 
 degree of temperature, the vital sap, excited and warmed 
 to a corresponding point, can mount no further, and finds 
 itself likewise forced to ferment without fruit and without 
 rest, like the water which bubbles incessantly, without 
 raising or lowering its murmur, by the constant heat of 
 a small fire. The result for me is a continued, subtle, 
 and obstinate suffering. Eager, restless, seeing imper- 
 fectly, my soul is touched by all the ills which a youth, 
 never destined to pass into manhood, is sure to engender. 
 I grow old, and exhaust myself in transports of soul so 
 ordinary, in passions of intellect so paltry, all that stirs 
 in me makes so little progress, and what cannot move 
 reveals itself so slov4y, that better a hu^idred times I 
 had received a mind blind and paralytic. My malady, 
 at first quite confined, has gained rapidly. Like a dis- 
 ease which spreads in the blood, to-day it appears every- 
 where, and under the strangest developments. My head 
 is parching. Like a tree which has lived ife life, I feel 
 as though every passing wind were blowing through dead 
 branches in my top. Work is insupportable to me, or 
 rather impossible. Mental application begets in me, not 
 sleep, but an irritable and nervous disgust, which carries 
 me, I know not whither, into the streets and public places. 
 The spring, whose blessings used every year to seek me 
 in my haunts, and charm me with gradual and stealthy 
 approaches, this year, overpowers me with a load of sud- 
 den heat. Life descends not from the sky in the fresh- 
 ness of the nights, nor is it dispensed in the drops of the 
 
Journal, 147 
 
 showers, nor diffused and held in sokition through the 
 wide expanse of the air; it falls from on high like a 
 weight. 
 
 I wish something would happen, to take me out of 
 the position in which I am. If I were free, I would em- 
 bark for some country where I should be obliged to form 
 new habits. 
 
 Wi. — My brain is dry. The pain I suffer in my 
 head is half moral, half physical. Some days I feel a 
 dull pain, as if the nerves were knotting themselves 
 with remorseless contractions. Excess of cold or heat, 
 weariness, certain movements of the head, irritation of 
 mind, contribute to this feeling. At such times, intel- 
 lection ceases. A strange stupor seizes me, I remain 
 motionless, feeling nothing but the heavy, overwhelm- 
 ing fixedness of life, (which seems to halt in a state of 
 inexplicable misery,) and the fluttering of an artery in 
 that part of my head. 
 
 30//^. — When suffering has departed, and you are 
 left with your pale, enfeebled life, still trusting, however, 
 and tasting a grateful calm, as the last twinges of pain 
 are hushed, the most self-contained soul has a yearning 
 for conversation, prolonged, rambling in topic, and min- 
 gled both with painful memories and the thousand, smiling 
 projects of hope. The first gleam of comfort which 
 dawns upon the life, penetrates, laden with soothing 
 dreams, and soft, vague images, like so many atoms, 
 floating in its radiant bosom. This state is dearer to 
 the soul than health.. At these moments, from many a 
 nook in my soul, as in the peaceful fields, beneath a 
 grayish sky, when the clouds are still, rise faint mur- 
 murs, tokens of the life which returns from afar. These 
 murmurs are produced by my thoughts, which, issuing 
 
148 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 from their painful torpor, make a light movement of 
 timid joy, and begin a discourse full of memories or 
 hopes. At other times, slower to waken, I hear within 
 me, during these hours of calm, only muffled and in- 
 frequent rustlings, as when, among the high branches 
 of a forest, a flock of birds are going to sleep. To-day, 
 relieved from all sense of opiDression, my thoughts talk 
 connectedly and calmly of sorrows endured and over- 
 come. They await life, the future, the arrival of the 
 successive mysteries of existence, fortifying each other 
 by the eloquence of private communings, or, hushed at 
 intervals, they listen to the bubbling flow of that inner 
 philosophy which, like those streams which used to pour 
 through the cloisters, courses under the surface of some 
 lives. 
 
 The greater part of those faculties which constitute 
 strength of mind, are either wanting in me, or exist only 
 in the germ, as the dead or unproductive nodes on trees 
 mark where branches should put forth. To classify, to 
 compare, to draw conclusions, arc for me operations of 
 such moment, consuming so rapidly the forces of my 
 intellect, that, even if all original impulse of mind does 
 not thereby come to naught, the power which remains 
 for it is rendered nearly useless. When I wish to con- 
 nect one truth with another, I am like a man who, 
 with a half-paralyzed arm, exerts himself to fasten two 
 things together : the arm rises with great difficulty, hesi- 
 tates, trembles, and always misses its mark. Any quan- 
 tity of causes, in my internal and external nature, early 
 inclined me to introspection. My own soul v/as my first 
 horizon. Long, long have I been studying it. I see 
 ascending from the depth of my being, vapors which 
 rise from it, as from a deep valley, and ^vhich assume 
 
Journal, 149 
 
 form only at the breath of chance j indescribable phan- 
 toms, which make their ascent slowly and without cessa- 
 tion. That powerful fascination exercised over the soul's 
 vision, as over the bodily organs of sight, by the monoto- 
 nous and uninterrupted passage of any trifling thing that 
 stirs, possesses me, and does not allow my eyes to turn 
 one moment from their pageant. 
 
 I get my living by the help of the little Latin which 
 the college put into my head, and which has somehow 
 survived there. The routine of the recitations, a variety 
 of tasks, occupy the greater part of my day. Absorption 
 in material cares occasions me great loss ; the stream 
 of my life runs to waste in the sands. I am left almost 
 with no reserved force, in this immense usurpation, by 
 the cares of daily subsistence, of the time due to thought, 
 and I foresee that in my life I shall always be obliged 
 to cast this divine part of me as a prey to cruel neces- 
 sity. I keep telling myself, indeed, that the moment 
 will come, when we shall begin to think in the assured 
 calm of eternity ; but from now until then, the rule must 
 be to suffer, to waste oneself in cares for the sake of 
 future gains ; to deprive the mind of much, in order to 
 buy for it a position among men, (God save the mark ! 
 I might better call them strangers,) a position whose 
 activity is, in a manner, insupportable, whose level is 
 disheartening ; this is a great agony of soul, which re- 
 verses strangely the meaning of that word, life. 
 
 May "jth. — You suffer to-day from the unexpressed 
 sense of poetry which fills your being. This suffering 
 is terrible, but so beautiful ! Be comforted by the noble 
 and rare nature of your tortures : there are so many men 
 who suffer as much as you from positive miseries ! Your 
 grief is of a privileged sort ; what more would you have 
 here below ? 
 
ijo Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 That which every man of a certain nature, rather 
 lonely than superior, guards with the utmost vigilance, 
 is the secret of his soul, and of the inmost habits of his 
 thought. I love that god Harpocrates, with finger on 
 
 lip. 
 
 i^th. — Who can call himself sheltered, if he be not 
 upon some height, and that the most absolute that he 
 can climb ? For some time have I been looking toward 
 those temples of serene wisdom which ancient philosophy 
 has reared on very high summits, and to which only a 
 small number attained. If I could but win those heights ! 
 When shall I be at peace ? Formerly, the gods, wishing 
 to reward -the virtue of certain mortals, caused to spring 
 up about them a vegetable nature, which, as it grew, ab- 
 sorbed in its embrace their aged bodies, and substituted 
 for their life, worn out by extreme age, the strong and 
 silent life, which holds sway under the bark of the oak. 
 These mortals having become motionless, rested, except 
 as the wind stirred their branching tops. Is not this the 
 sage, and his calm? Does he not, after a long time, 
 assume this metamorphosis of the few men who were be- 
 loved by the gods ? To subsist by a strength chosen by 
 oneself from the elements, to be enveloped in it, to ap- 
 pear to men firmly rooted, and stolidly indifferent, like 
 the great trunks of certain trees that one admires in the 
 forests, haply to utter only such vague but deep sounds as 
 those of some tufted tree-tops, which imitate the murmurs 
 of the sea — this is a condition of life which seems to me 
 worthy of effort, and well suited to oppose against men 
 and the fortune of the day. 
 
 J^une 4th. — Why am I saddened to such a degree, 
 by the sight of indifferent productions ? I never chance 
 to open a book of the class of that which we looked 
 
Journal. 151 
 
 through yesterday, without bringing away from it pain- 
 ful thoughts, and a depressed imagination. Is it a sor- 
 rowful pity for this spectacle — one of the saddest that I 
 know — of impotent vanity ? or is it rather consciousness, 
 and a recoil upon, myself? However it may be, what 
 matter ? The beauty of human life does not consist in 
 the strivings of the intellect. There must be great medi- 
 ocrity of soul, to be unable to endure that of the mind. 
 I understand all that, and yet languish in making weak 
 attempts. My God, what moral education is given now- 
 a-days ? I am twenty-five years old, of v/hich ten were 
 passed in the schools, and I have not yet opened the 
 rudiments of interior strength, and of the culture of the 
 moral sense ! Never has a word been uttered to me of 
 the greatness of the soul. It was only yesterday, that, 
 an old child, I began to have an insight into man, but 
 at a vast distance, and upon those serene heights which 
 are hardly attainable by a foot already feeble. With an 
 inveterate deficiency, and all impotent from lamentable 
 habits of thought, I drag myself along, and mark my way 
 with suffering. But yet I understand, yet I see, and if 
 I do not attain to the moral beauty of my days, I shall, 
 at least, die with my eyes fixed upon it. There is, how- 
 ever, in me a very grievous sign : it is, that each day I 
 find myself hardly in advance of the actions of the day 
 before, and that my soul seems to remain at the level of 
 the same actions, actions already remote in the past. 
 My mind, on the contrary, soon sees all its performances 
 growing old. What happiness to surmount one's past, 
 and what joy there is in being able to disdain oneself 
 from day to day in one's actions ! What a destiny, if I 
 am to remain coeternal with myself in the moral state 
 which I occupy at this moment ! 
 
152 Maurice de Guerin, 
 
 ^th. — My God, how wearisome is life ! Not in its 
 accidents — a little philosophy suffices for that ; but in 
 itself, in its essence, aside from all phenomena. I in- 
 crease in years, my mind lets drop in its path a thousand 
 spoils, ties are severed, prejudices are dethroned, I be- 
 gin to show my head above the waves ; but existence 
 itself remains entangled : always the same painful point 
 marking the centre of the circumference. Is there any 
 philosophy, are there any rules which apply to this evil ? 
 I know less and less of this depth of life, and what one 
 must do in it. O, philosophy of the Porch, instituted 
 to war against grief by strength and steadiness of soul, 
 thou knewest how to oppose life only with death, and we 
 have advanced no further than thou ! 
 
 i2t/i. — I do not commit my wicked actions impetu- 
 ously. There are in the depth of my nature, I know 
 not what waters, dead and deadly, like that deep pond 
 in which perished the poet Stenio. 
 
 22d. — What makes me, at times, despair of myself, 
 is the intensity of my suffering on slight grounds, and 
 the exercise, always misjudged and blind, of my moral 
 forces. I use, sometimes, to roll grains of sand, an 
 energy capable of forcing a rock to the summit of a 
 mountain. I could bear enormous burdens, better than 
 this light and almost intangible dust which clings to me. 
 I die daily in secret ; my life flows out by invisible pin- 
 pricks. I was told, not long ago, that a contempt for 
 men would lead me far; yes, especially if bitterness 
 mingle with it. My surroundings weary me ; I know 
 not where I would like to live, nor in what profession ; 
 but I detest mine, which spoils me, and makes me miser- 
 able. It makes me part company, at every moment, 
 with the little philosophy that I have gained in free and 
 
Journal, 1 1^'}^ 
 
 thoughtful hours ; it irritates me against men who seem 
 yet children. How I hate myself in these miseries, and 
 what violent longings take possession of me to spring 
 upon a free shore, spurning with my foot the detested 
 bark which has borne my burden ! 
 
 July 1 1//;.— Which is the true God? The God of 
 cities, or the God of the deserts ? To which shall I turn ? 
 Tastes long fostered, impulses of the heart, the accidents 
 of life, decide the choice. We bear within us a thousand 
 fatalities. What do we know of what urges us on, and 
 which is the best among all these things ? The dweller 
 in cities ridicules in secret the lonely dreams of the 
 solitary ; the latter glories in his life of isolation, like the 
 islands of the great ocean, far from continents, and washed 
 by waves unknown. The most to be pitied are those 
 who, tossed between these two contradictions, stretch 
 out their arms towards both. 
 
 October iT^tk. — I have been travelling. I know not 
 what impulse of destiny bore me along the banks of the 
 river to the sea. I saw all along this river plains, where 
 Nature is rich and gay, royal and ancient dwellings, 
 scored with memories which have their place in the sad 
 legend of humanity, numerous cities, and, at the end, the 
 roaring ocean. Thence I went back into the interior, to 
 the land of great forests, where the noises of another 
 vast plain abound unceasingly. I experienced fatigues, 
 which I shall enjoy long and vividly in the retrospect, 
 in crossing the great open plains, in scaling horizon after 
 horizon, revelling in space, and obtaining many times 
 during the day those impressions which spring up from 
 every quarter, in passing through new stretches of coun- 
 try, and swarm around and overpower the traveller. 
 The stream of travel is very sweet. * * * Oh ! who 
 shall set me adrift upon this Nile ? * * Jft-A^^^^^^ii. 
 
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