He had little to say in favor of the Greeks. “For me,” says he, “Greece is like a book the beauties of which are tarnished, because we have been made to read it before we were able to understand it. Nevertheless, the enchantment is not off from everything. There is still an echo of all those great names remaining in my heart. Something holy, sweet, fragrant, mounts up with the horizons in my soul. I thank God for having seen, while passing by this land, the country of the Doers of Great Deeds, as Epaminondas called his fatherland.” He felt keenly a sense of isolation that he had no one to participate in these sentiments. “Always,” says he, “when a strong impression stirs my soul I feel the necessity to speak or to write to some one of what I am experiencing, to find in some degree a joy from my joy, an echoing of that which has impressed me. Isolated feeling is not complete: man has been created double. Ah! when I look around me, there is yet a void. Julia and Marianne fill everything for themselves alone; but Julia is still so young that I tell her only what is suited to her age. It is all future; it will soon be all present for us; but the past, where is it now? “The person who would have most enjoyed my happiness at this moment, is my Mother. In everything that happened to me, pleasant or sad, my thought turns involuntarily to her. I believe I see her, hear her, talk to her, write to her. One who is remembered so much is not absent; whoever lives so completely, so powerfully in ourselves is not dead for us.” “Empty dream! She is there no more; she is dwelling in the world of realities; our vagrant dreams are no more anything to her; but her spirit is with us, it visits us, it follows with us, it protects us: _our conversation is with her in the eternal regions_.” He goes on to describe his condition. “Before I had reached the age of maturity I had lost the greater part of those here below whom I most loved, or who most loved me. My love-life had become concentrated; my heart had only a few other hearts to take voyage with. My memory had little more than graves where it might rest here in the earth; I lived more with the dead than with the living. If God were to strike two or three of his blows around me, I feel that I would be detached entirely by myself, for I would contemplate myself no more. I would love myself only in the others; and it is only there that I can love.” “One begins to feel the emptiness of existence from the day when he is no more necessary to anybody, from the hour when he can no more be dearly loved. The sole reality here below, I have always felt, is love, love under all its forms.” “To us poets, beauty is evident and perceptible; we are not beings of abstraction, but men of nature and instinct; so I have travelled many times through Rome; so I have visited the seas and the mountains; so I have read the sages, the historians and the poets; so have I visited Athens.”