or going far, that they have left so deep a mark in literature. For again the manner, also, their style precisely becomes them. The merits of Pascal's style, indeed, as of the French language itself, still is to say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots; and the brevity, the discerning edge, the impassioned concentration of the language are here one with the ardent immediate apprehensions of his spirit. One of the literary merits of the "Provincial Letters" is that they are really like letters; they are essentially a conversation by writing with other persons. What we have in the "Thoughts" is the conversation of the writer with himself, with himself and with God, or rather concerning Him, for He is, in Pascal's favourite phrase from the Vulgate, Deus absconditus, He who never directly shows Himself. Choses de coeur the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of an individual, though they seem to have determined the very outlines of a great subject for all other persons. In Pascal, at the summit of the Puy de Dome in his native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight of the invisible air, proving it to be ever all around by its effects, we are presented with one of the more pleasing [76] aspects of his earlier, more wholesome, open-air life. In the great work of which the "Thoughts" are the first head, Pascal conceived himself to be doing something of the same kind in the spiritual order by a demonstration of this other invisible world all around us, with its really ponderable forces, its movement, its attractions and repulsions, the world of grace, unseen, but, as he thinks, the one only hypothesis that can explain the experienced, admitted facts. Whether or not he was fixing permanently in the "Pensees" the outlines, the principles, of a great system of assent, of conviction, for acceptance by the intellect, he was certainly fixing these with all the imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare himself, the fancied opposites, the attitudes, the necessary forms of pathos,+ of a great tragedy in the heart, the soul, the essential human tragedy, as typical and central in its expression here, as Hamlet--what the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it--or when confronted with the thought of what are called the "four last things" it yields this way or that. What might have passed with all its fiery ways for an esprit de secte et de cabale is now revealed amid the disputes not of a single generation but of eternal ones, by the light of a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspirations.