At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature--life--it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the nethermost Hell. [Sidenote: _Rene._] _Rene_[24] has greater fame and no doubt exercised far more influence; indeed in this respect _Atala_ could not do much, for it is not the eternal, but the temporal, which "influences." But, in the same humble opinion, it is extremely inferior. The French Werther[25] (for the attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is hardly, if at all, veiled) is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose father dies. He lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be "more kin than kind," and a sister Amelie, to whom he is fondly, but fraternally, attached. Rene has begun the trick of disappointment early, and, after a time, determines to travel, fancying when he leaves home that his sister is actually glad to get rid of him. Of course it is a case of _coelum non animum_. When he returns he is half-surprised but (for him) wholly glad to be at first warmly welcomed by Amelie; but after a little while she leaves him, takes the veil, and lets him know at the last moment that it is because her affection for him is more than sisterly, that this was the reason of her apparent joy when he left her, and that association with him is too much for her passion.[26] _She_ makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught while nursing others. _He_, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is a (though not _the_) chief. [Sidenote: Difference between its importance and its merit.]