lost creatures, was murmured to me from every wave and from every bough. With a million of tongues the countless foliage reproached my negligent tardiness. My eye pierced through the past and future, my thoughts were adoration, my feelings holy devotion. "I plunged into the thickest woods and gave a free course to my flowing tears, I now received the third summons and I no longer resisted it. In the solitude of night, my whole being was absorbed in prayer and thanksgiving, wonderously the strongest words poured forth without the slightest exertion, as tears flow without design, as wave follows wave down the stream, as the wind puts in motion the numberless foliage of the forest, thus led by a higher and invisible spirit, my speech was changed into prophecy. A new being arose within me, I no longer recognised that of yesterday. In the mirror of my inmost soul another eye, different from my own, met mine, nevertheless this was really myself. Now resting, now walking, I found myself in the twilight of morning in the district of Sauve among the recesses of the mountains. You know, my father, the lofty situation of the dreary landscape there, no tree, no shrub, scarcely a solitary blade of grass upon the barren, white chalky waste, and as far as the eye extends, trunks of trees, heaps of lime stones in all shapes, like men, animals and horses, dazzling and fatiguing the sight, spread about, and at intervals rolling stones, and a little lower down, the small, gloomy, solitary town. Here I threw myself down again and gazed upon the waste ruin around, and upon the dark blue sky above me, strange how my spirit wandered there! I cannot explain by any human language, how instantaneously my heart was impressed with every feeling of belief, with every noble thought, how creation, nature, and the strangest mystery, man with his wonderful energies and his common dependance on the elements, how vain, how contradictory and ridiculous all this appeared to me now. I could not collect myself, I was compelled incessantly to follow this train of thought and to find relief in loud laughter. Then there was no God, no spirit, nothing but puerility, madness, and deformity, in all that creeps, swims, and flies, especially in this ball that thinks, reflects, and weeps, and underneath devours and masticates. Oh, let me be silent and not again discover the maddening images that took possession of my mind, annihilation, dead, cold non-existence appeared to me alone desirable and noble. I was utterly undone, and painful was my return to life, but I at length found it with the help of the compassionate one." The father seized his son's hand, "Mark my child," said he mildly, "as soon as all these wonderous sensations shall in wild controversy have traversed your soul, you will assuredly be yourself again and return to us entirely. Your lacerated heart will resume its tranquility and repose after these commotions, and then will your understanding and