A line from Karl――one heart-rending plaint, thrown into the post at Paris after Ellen had received your last kiss. “Pray,” he says to me, “not for this soul, of whom I was not worthy, and who is going to rejoin her son, but for my weakness, which alarms me.” René wept with me. Oh! how sad is earth to him who remains alone. The same thought of anguish and apprehension seized us both. Ah! dearest, let your prayers preserve to me him in whom I live. _Saint Elizabeth_, “the dear saint,” this fair and lovely flower of Hungary transplanted into Thuringia, there to shed such sweetness of perfume! I have been thinking of her, of her poetic history, of all that M. de Montalembert has written about her――the veritable life of a saint, traced out with poetry and love. You remember that St. Elizabeth was one of the chosen heroines of my childhood. I could wish that I had borne her name. I used to dream of becoming a saint like her. What an unparalleled life hers was! Dying so young, she appeared before God rich in merits. Born in the purple, the beloved daughter of the good King Andrew, and afterwards Duchess of Thuringia; united to the young Duke Louis, also so good and holy, so well suited to the pure and radiant star of Hungary seen by the aged poet; then a widow at nineteen years of age, and driven from her palace with her little children, drinking to its dregs the cup of bitterness and anguish――my dear saint knew suffering in its most terrible and poignant form. How I love her, from the moment when the good King Andrew, taking in his arms the cradle of solid gold in which his Elizabeth was sleeping, placed it in those of the Sire de Varila, saying, “I entrust to your knightly honor my dearest consolation,” until the time when I find her, clad in the poor habit of the Seraph of Assisi, reading a letter of St. Clare! What an epoch was that thirteenth century, that age of faith, when the throne had its saints, when there was in the souls of men a spring of energy and of religious enthusiasm which peopled the monasteries and renewed the face of the earth! Who will obtain for me the grace to love God as did Elizabeth? O dear saint! pray for me, for René, Karl, Ellen, the church, France, Ireland, the universe. Here is something, dear sister, which I think would comfort Karl: “To desire God is the essential condition of the human heart; to go to God is his life; to contemplate God is his beatitude. To desire God is the noble appanage of our nature; to go to God is the work which grace effects within us; to contemplate God is our state of glory. To desire God is the principle of good; to go to God is the way of good; to contemplate God is the perfection of good.