s
death-struggle? The meadow is blighted, the flowers are gone, and the
very grass is scarce and poor. Nothing in nature stirs, not a bird in
the air, not an insect on the earth. You see the sun again, it is
true, but void of rays and heat.

CHAPTER VIII.

FENELON AS DIRECTOR.--HIS QUIETISM.--MAXIMS OF SAINTS, 1697.--FENELON
AND MADAME DE LA MAISONPORT.

Madame Guyon was not apparently the extravagant and chimerical person
that her enemies pretend, since, on her arrival at Paris from Savoy,
she managed to captivate and secure, at her first onset, the man, of
all others, the most capable of giving a relish to her doctrines--a man
of genius, who, moreover, had an infinite fund of sagacity and address,
and who, independently of all these merits, possessed what had
dispensed, if necessary, with every other qualification, being, at that
time, the director the most in vogue.

This new Chantal required a St. Francois de Sales; she found one in
Fenelon, who was less serene and innocent, it is true, and less
refulgent with boyhood and seraphic grace, but eminently noble and
shrewd, subtle, eloquent, close, very devout, and very intriguing.

She laid her hands upon him, seized and carried him by an easy assault.
This great genius, whose mind was stored with every variety and every
contradiction, would probably have continued to waver, had it not been
for this powerful impulse that forced him all on one side. Till then
he had wandered between different opinions, and opposite parties and
communities, so that every one claimed him as his own, and thought to
possess him. Though assiduous in courting Bossuet, whose disciple he
said he was, never leaving his side in his retirement at Meaux, he was
not less friendly to the Jesuits, and, between the two, he still held
fast to Saint-Sulpice. In his theology, at one time inclining towards
Grace, at another towards Free-will, imbued with the oldest mystics,
and full of the presentiments of the eighteenth century, he seems to
have had, beneath his faith, some obscure corners of scepticism which
he was unwilling to fathom. All these divers elements, without being
able to combine, were harmonised in his outward actions, under the
graceful influence of the most elegant genius that was ever met with.
Being both a Grecian and a Christian, he reminds us at the same time of
the fathers, philosophers, and romancers of the Alexandrian period; and
sometimes our sophist turns proph