of a
world. The professional duty to which he had sacrificed everything
ceased to have any object. He did not regret having formed too high
an idea of duty, and it never occurred to him that he might have
grown rich as others had done; but he lost faith in all save God. The
Carlists of Treguier went about declaring that the new order of things
would not last, and that the rightful king would soon return. He
only smiled at these foolish predictions, and died soon afterwards,
assisted in his last moments by the priest, who expounded to him that
beautiful passage in the burial service: 'Be not like the heathen, who
are without hope.'
"After his death his daughter was totally unprovided for, and
arrangements were made for placing her in the hospital where you saw
her. No doubt she, too, is dead ere this, and another sleeps in her
bed at the hospital."
PRAYER ON THE ACROPOLIS.
It was not until I was well advanced in life that I began to have any
souvenirs. The imperious necessity which compelled me during my early
years to solve for myself, not with the leisurely deliberation of the
thinker, but with the feverish ardour of one who has to struggle for
life, the loftiest problems of philosophy and religion never left me
a quarter of an hour's leisure to look behind me. Afterwards dragged
into the current of the century in which I lived, and concerning which
I was in complete ignorance, there was suddenly disclosed to my gaze a
spectacle as novel to me as the society of Saturn or Venus would be
to any one landed in those planets. It struck me as being paltry and
morally inferior to what I had seen at Issy and St. Sulpice; though
the great scientific and critical attainments of men like Eugene
Burnouf, the brilliant conversation of M. Cousin, and the revival
brought about by Germany in nearly all the historical sciences,
coupled with my travels and the fever of production, carried me away
and prevented me from meditating on the years which were already
relegated to what seemed like a distant past. My residence in Syria
tended still further to obliterate my early recollections. The new
sensations which I experienced there, the glimpses which I caught of
a divine world, so different from our frigid and sombre countries,
absorbed my whole being. My dreams were haunted for a time by the
burnt-up mountain-chain of Galaad and the peak of Safed, where the
Messiah was to appear, by Carmel and its beds of anemone sown by
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