e picture of this ardent and unfaltering
friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an
octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not where, in the
annals of human affection, to find the account of a friendship more
spotless or more morally satisfying than this. The volume which
preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly
interested in the psychology and experience of persons so
extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity
and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and
romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred
epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This
double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous
gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book
before us.

The chivalrous young Count de Montalembert was one of the dearest
friends of Madame Swetchine. She said that his soul seemed formed
under the inspiration of the fine thought of Plato: "The beautiful as
a means of reaching the true." Behold, in the following extract from
one of the many letters in which she strove to pacify his perturbed
spirit, by recalling him from the war of politics, and reconciling
his passionate reformatory sentiments with the ruling principles and
authorities of the Catholic Church, the tender wisdom and affection
with which she speaks: "You seize only on the disinterested and
poetic side of these questions, but all the same you are in the
battle, giving and taking blows. And thus, with a mind perfectly
high-toned and honorable, a crystal which is almost a diamond, with
faultless habits, and all the believing and pious sentiments they
involve, you have neither the heart's sweet joy nor its sweet peace.
The reason why you are so ill at ease, is, that your conscience lies
so near your heart that their voices and their troubles are
confounded. My dear Charles, will you not reward me by being all that
my wishes and my prayers would fain make you? I will not say whether
you have the power to rejoice or afflict my heart; but, when you woke
in me a mother's emotions, I cannot believe that you condemned me to
the sorrow of Rachel."

One day this beloved young man led to the drawing-room of his
maternal friend his heart's brother, the eloquent Lacordaire, then in
the early renown of his wonderful career of ecclesiastical oratory.
Madame Swetchine had already been deeply