still left us power to dream, above all, of the life of the heart—that the days began and ended according as a loved remembrance had risen or had been silent in the soul. It was he who spoke to me thus; and he added immediately, ‘Alas! we ought to love only the infinite, and this is the reason why that which we love is so complete in our soul.’ The morning after this first meeting he took me to hear his mass, which he said in the chapel of a little convent of the Visitandines in the _Pays Latin_, and already we loved each other as men love in the pure and generous impulses of youth and under the fire of the enemy. He condescended to rejoice over that meeting which he had desired, and upon which he congratulated himself in terms which expressed his classic and democratic thought. He wrote, some time before, ‘My soul, like Iphigenia, awaits its brother at the foot of the altar.’ Afterwards, speaking of his new friend to an older one, he said, ‘I love him like a plebeian.’” Such was the fervent young man with whom, in the year of the Revolution, in the warmth of their youth, the young Montalembert formed an everlasting friendship. They lived henceforward in a union close as that of the classic models of amity, and effusive as is natural to young Frenchmen. The two had hard enough work in hand in those brilliant, agitated, youthful days, over which M. de Montalembert lingers with a natural fondness. In the reign of utter prose which had begun, this Young France stood all glowing and poetic—believing in a new beginning as youth always believes—hoping everything grand, exalted, and generous from the new era and its own toils. They had their journal, choice vehicle of assault upon the world and all its wrongs; and from that little battery thundered, day by day, at all the injustice and oppression which came under their quick observation, taking summary vengeance upon the offenders. To-day it was a petty official, “_lui, ce sous-préfet!_” whom the young Abbé tossed in the air on the point of that dazzling spear of youthful scorn and beautiful indignation—to-morrow it was the new Government itself which felt the diamond point of their virgin weapons. Young ardour, daring hardihood, wild rushes at conclusions, grand assumption and display of wisdom, mixed with a thorough enjoyment and relish in the dangerous sport, shine through the tale. The young men were in the flush of youth and conscious power, exercising a censorship which somehow comes natural to youth, and which, in its brilliant impertinence and freshness of life, earns its own excuse almost from its victims. Lamennais, though not young, was of that character of genius—generous, susceptible, and wilful—which commends itself to the young, and leads without controlling them. He who, in the wild retirement of La Chenaie amid the Breton woods, made for himself a little family of the youths whom he had devoted himself to train for