aid of
myself, for I am wasting in depression and bewilderment. Thou hast
hitherto led me by the hand. Do not desert me; finish Thy work. I know
that it is folly thus to take care for the future, for Thy Son has said,
'Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.' Still, that depends on
temperament. What is easy to some is so hard for others. Mine is a
restless spirit, always astir, always on the alert. Do what I will, it
wanders, feeling its way about the world, and gets lost! Bring it home,
keep it near Thee in a leash, kind Mother, and after so much weariness,
grant me to find rest!

"Oh! to be no longer thus torn in sunder, to be of one mind! Oh! to have
a soul so quenched that it should know no sorrows, no joys, but those of
the liturgy, that it might only be claimed, day by day, by Jesus or by
Thee, and follow Your lives as they are unfolded in the annual cycle of
the Church services! To rejoice at the Nativity, to laugh on Palm
Sunday, to weep in Holy Week, and be indifferent to all else, to cease
to hold oneself as of any account, to care not at all for one's
individual self! What a dream! How easy it then would be to take refuge
in a cloister!

"But is this possible to any but a saint? What a stripping of the soul
it presupposes; what an emptying out of every profane idea, of every
earthly image; what a taming of the subjugated imagination, never
venturing forth but on one track, instead of wandering haphazard as mine
does!

"And yet how foolish is every other care--for all that does not tend to
Heaven is vain on earth. Aye, but as soon as I try to put these thoughts
into, practice, my jade of a soul plunges and rears; do what I will, it
only bucks and makes no advance.

"Alas! Blessed Virgin, I do not seek to excuse myself and my sins. And
still I dare confess to Thee that it is discouraging, heart-breaking, to
understand nothing and see nothing! Is this Chartres where I am
vegetating a waiting-place, a halting-place between two monasteries, a
bridge leading from Notre Dame de l'Atre to Solesmes or some other
Abbey? Or is it, on the contrary, the final stage where it is Thy will
that I should remain fixed? But then my life has no further meaning! It
is purposeless, built and overthrown with the shifting of sands. To what
end, if this be the case, are these monastic yearnings, these calls to
another life, this all but conviction that I have stopped at a station,
and am not yet at the place whither I am to tr