René will be in Paris on the 15th, darling Kate. He will tell you about Karl, Lizzy, Isa, all our friends, and then I shall have him again! Adrien is reading Lamartine to us; I always listen with enchantment. What poetry! It flows in streams; it is sweet, tender, melancholy, moaning; it sings with nature, with the bird, with the falling leaf, the murmuring stream, the sounding bell, the sighing wind; it weeps with the suffering heart, and prays with the pleading soul. Oh! how is it that this poet could stray aside from his heavenly road, and burn incense on other altars? How could he leave his Christian lyre――he who once sang to God of his faith and love in accents so sublime? Will he not one day recover the sentiments and emotions of his youth, when he went in the footsteps of his mother to the house of God _Offrir deux purs encens, innocence et bonheur._[29] The _Harmonies_ are rightly named. I never read anything more harmoniously sweet, more exquisite in cadence. How comes it that he should have lost his faith where so many others have found it――in that journey to the East, from which he ought to have returned a firmer Catholic, a greater poet? Could it be that the death of his daughter, she who was his future, his joy, his dearest glory, overthrew everything within him? O my God! this lyre has, almost divinely, sung of thee; thou wilt not suffer its last notes to be a blasphemy. Draw all unto thyself, Lord Jesus, and let not the brows marked by the seal of genius be stamped eternally with that of reprobation!