day to her absent brother for whom she wrote, and a weapon with which to fight the unconquerable disquiet of her heart. Her finely balanced nature, which resisted sorrow and ennui to the end, forced her to adopt that precision of phrase which is the triumph of French prose. There is a tender grace in her descriptions, a restraint in her sweet, sudden confidences, a wistfulness in her joy, and always a nobility of thought which makes even her gentleness seem austere. But Maurice de Guérin had in him a power of enjoyment and of suffering which filled his life with profound emotions, and these emotions break like waves at our feet when we read the brief pages of his diary. There is the record of a single day at Le Val, so brimming with blessedness and beauty that it illustrates the lasting nature of pure earthly happiness; for such days are counted out like fairy gold, and we are richer all our lives for having grasped them once. There are passages of power and subtlety which show that nature took to her heart this trembling seeker after felicity, cast from him the chains of care and thought, and bade him taste for one keen hour “the noble voluptuousness of freedom.” Then, breaking swiftly in amid vain dreams of joy, comes the bitter moment of awakening, and the sad voice of humanity sounds wailing in his ears. “My God, how I suffer from life! Not from its accidents,--a little philosophy suffices for them,--but from itself, from its substance, from all its phenomena.” And ever wearing away his heart is the restlessness of a nature which craved beauty for its daily food, which longed passionately for whatever was fairest in the world, for the lands and the seas he was destined never to behold. Eugénie, in her solitude at Le Cayla, trained herself to echo with gentle stoicism the words of A Kempis: “What canst thou see anywhere that thou seest not here? Behold the heavens and the earth and all the elements! For out of these are all things made.” Her horizon was bounded by the walls of home. She worked, she prayed, she read her few books, she taught the peasant children the little it behooved them to know; she played with the gray cat, and with the three dogs, Lion, Wolf, and little Trilby whom she loved best of all, and from whom, rather than from a stupid fairy tale, it may be that Du Maurier stole his heroine’s name. She won peace, if not contentment, by the fulfillment of near duties; but in her brother the unquenchable desire of travel burned like a smouldering fire. In dreams he wandered far amid ancient and sunlit lands whose mighty monuments are part of the mysterious legends of humanity. “The road of the wayfarer is a joyous one!” he cries. “Ah! who shall set me adrift upon the Nile!”--and with these words the journal of Maurice de Guérin comes to a sudden end. A river deeper than the Nile was opening beneath his passionate, tired young eyes. Remoter lands than Egypt lay before his feet. GUIDES: A PROTEST.