matter in Thy hands, as I leave my life and my soul."

On the 20th of April he wrote:--"The little horse is well; God has
helped me."

German manners and customs are so different from ours, and contrasts
occur so frequently in the same man, on the other side of the Rhine, that
anything less than all the quotations which we have given would have been
insufficient to place before our readers a true idea of that character
made up of artlessness and reason, childishness and strength, depression
and enthusiasm, material details and poetic ideas, which renders Sand a
man incomprehensible to us. We will now continue the portrait, which
still wants a few finishing touches.

When he returned to Erlangen, after the completion of his "cure," Sand
read Faust far the first time. At first he was amazed at that work,
which seemed to him an orgy of genius; then, when he had entirely
finished it, he reconsidered his first impression, and wrote:--

"4th May

"Oh, horrible struggle of man and devil! What Mephistopheles is in me I
feel far the first time in this hour, and I feel it, O God, with
consternation!

"About eleven at night I finished reading the tragedy, and I felt and saw
the fiend in myself, so that by midnight, amid my tears and despair, I
was at last frightened at myself."

Sand was falling by degrees into a deep melancholy, from which nothing
could rouse him except his desire to purify and preach morality to the
students around him. To anyone who knows university life such a task
will seem superhuman. Sand, however, was not discouraged, and if he
could not gain an influence over everyone, he at least succeeded in
forming around him a considerable circle of the most intelligent and the
best; nevertheless, in the midst of these apostolic labours strange
longings for death would overcome him; he seemed to recall heaven and
want to return to it; he called these temptations "homesickness for the
soul's country."

His favourite authors were Lessing, Schiller, Herder, and Goethe; after
re-reading the two last for the twentieth time, this is what he wrote:

"Good and evil touch each other; the woes of the young Werther and
Weisslingen's seduction, are almost the same story; no matter, we must
not judge between what is good and what is evil in others; for that is
what God will do. I have just been spending much time over this thought,
and have become convinced that in no circumstances ought we to allow
ourselves to s