an I had ever
been. God and my love were so mingled in my heart, that my adoration of
her became a perpetual adoration of the Supreme Being who had created
her. During the day, when we loitered on the sloping hills or on the
borders of the lake, or sat on the root of some tree in a sunny lawn,
to rest, to gaze, and to admire, our conversation would often, from the
natural overflowing of two full hearts, tend towards that fathomless
abyss of all thought,--the Infinite! and towards Him who alone can fill
infinite space,--God! When I pronounced this last word, with the
heartfelt gratitude which reveals so much in one single accent, I was
surprised to see her averted looks, or remark on her brow and in the
corners of her mouth a trace of sad and painful incredulity, which
seemed to me in contradiction with our enthusiasm. One day, I asked
her, timidly, the reason. "It is that that word gives me pain," she
answered. "And how," said I, "how can the word that comprehends all
life, all love, and all goodness give pain to the most perfect of God's
creations?" "Alas!" she said with the tone of a despairing soul, "that
word represents the idea of a Being, whose existence I have
passionately desired might not be a dream; and yet that Being," she
added in a low and mournful tone, "in my eyes, and in those of the
sages whose lessons I have received, is but the most marvellous and
unreal delusion of our thoughts." "What!" said I, "your teachers do not
believe there is a God? But you, who love, how can you disbelieve? Does
not every throb of our hearts proclaim Him?" "Oh," she answered
hastily, "do not interpret as folly the wisdom of those men who have
uplifted for me the veils of philosophy, and have caused the broad day
of reason and of science to shine before my eyes, instead of the pale
and glimmering lamp with which Superstition lights the voluntary
darkness, that she wilfully casts around her childish divinity. It is
in the God of your mother and my nurse that I no longer believe, and
not the God of Nature and of Science. I believe in a Being who is the
Principle and Cause, spring and end of all other beings, or rather, who
is himself the eternity, form, and law of all those beings, visible or
invisible, intelligent or unintelligent, animate or inanimate, quick or
dead, of which is composed the only real name of this Being of beings,
the Infinite. But the idea of the incommensurable greatness, the
sovereign fatality, the inflexib