me feel the truth of a sentence which once dropped from her pen:
There is nothing in life irrevocable, except death.'"

The deep and stern solitude of Comte, the wearisome toils he
underwent, the austere pre-occupations of his mind, the harassments
and lacerations he had known, seemed to make him doubly susceptible
to the action of the sympathetic instincts, to those pleasures of
praise and tenderness which aggrandize and sweeten our existence, and
constitute our keenest happiness. No one was purer than he in his
life; no one severer in his condemnation of every form of corrupt
indulgence. Therefore, no one has had a higher idea of the value of
feminine friendship, and no one been more loyal to it in his own
experience. It is truly touching to read, in the light of his life
and character, what he has written on this topic. The three guardian
angels, for devout and effusive communion with whom he set apart a
sacred period every day, were, Rosalie Boyer, Clotilde de Vaux, and
Sophie Eliot, his mother, his friend, and his servant. By prayer and
meditation on these three beloved memories, he cultivated the three
chief sympathies, veneration for superiors, attachment to equals,
goodness to inferiors. He expresses the deepest gratitude for the
privilege of that friendship, "the tardy felicity reserved for a
solitary life, devoted, from the first, to the fundamental service of
humanity." Even its removal by death, he said, did not restore his
former isolation; for the inward treasure of affection it had
bestowed, constantly contemplated afresh in memory, remained the
permanent and principal resource of his life. "She has, now for more
than six years since her death, been associated with all my thoughts,
and with all my feelings."

The injustice of the popular view of Comte's character, in its
deepest truth, as hard, coarse, despotic, is shown by his favorite
aphorisms. "Live for others." "Disinterested love is the supreme good
of man." "Love cannot be deep, unless it is also pure." "The one
thing essential to happiness is, that the heart shall be always nobly
occupied." It is probable that Comte exaggerated the worth of his
friend, when he ascribed to her "a marvellous combination of
tenderness and nobleness, never, perhaps, realized in another heart
in an equal degree;" but he did not exaggerate the blessed comfort
which her friendship was to him, or the power with which it wrought
in his soul. That she was a very superior