little papers written by his hand. A silent presence--I
was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed
itself--revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad
and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.

It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had
lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age
had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help
from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words
as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent
love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her
eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing
themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the
monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which
move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly
beloved and for himself.

It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious
temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written
from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in
the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in
the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to
seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of
eternity with a deeper insight and a keener feeling, as each one, in the
full strength of life and youth, dwelt upon the thought of beholding the
world for the last time:

'Et le monde allait donc mourir
Avec mes yeux, miroir du monde.'

Solemn thought for the man who has watched through a long night in some
advance-post, and who, beyond the grey and silent plain where lurks the
enemy, sees a red sun rise yet once more upon the world! 'O splendid
sun, I wish I could see you again!' wrote once, on the evening of his
advance upon French ground, a young Silesian soldier who fell upon the
battlefield of the Marne, and whose Journal has been published. Suddenly
breaks in this mysterious cry in the course of methodical German notes
on food and drink, stages of the march, blistered feet, the number of
villages set on fire. And in how many French letters too have we found
it--that abrupt intuition! It is always the same, in many and various
words: in those of the agriculturist of the Seine-et-Marne, whom I
could name, and who for perhaps the f