patient, and wait--these, too, may be action; as also, to hear, to watch, and be silent. If the lot of the woman we speak of had been cast in Athens, or Florence, or Rome, there had been, in her life, certain motives of grandeur, occasions for beauty and happiness, that she may well never meet with to-day. And she is the poorer for lacking the efforts she might have put forth, the memory of what might have been done; for in these lies a force that is precious and vital, that often indeed will transform many more things within us, than a thought which is morally, mentally worth many thousand such efforts and memories. And indeed it is therefore alone that we should desire a brilliant, feverish destiny; because it summons to life certain forces and feelings that would otherwise never emerge from the slumberous peace of an over-tranquil existence. But from the moment we know, or even suspect, that these feelings lie dormant within us, we are already giving life to all that is best in those feelings; and it is as though we were, for one brief moment, looking down upon a glorious external destiny from heights such destiny shall only attain at the end of its days; as though we were prematurely gathering the fruit of the tree, which it shall itself still find barren until many a storm has passed. 95. Last night, re-reading Saint-Simon--with whom we seem to ascend a lofty tower, whence our gaze rests on hundreds of human destinies, astir in the valley below--I understood what a beautiful destiny meant to the instinct of man. It would doubtless have puzzled Saint-Simon himself to have told what it was that he loved and admired in some of his heroes, whom he enwraps in a sort of resigned, and almost unconscious, respect. Thousands of virtues that he esteemed highly have ceased to exist to-day, and many a quality now seems petty indeed that he commended in some of his great ones. And yet are there, unperceived as it were by him, four or five men in the midst of the glittering crowd hard by the monarch's throne, four or five earnest benevolent faces on whom our eye still rests gladly; though Saint-Simon gives them no special attention or thought, for in his heart he looks with disfavour on the ideas that govern their life. Fenelon is there; the Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers; there is Monsieur le Dauphin. Their happiness is no greater than that of the rest of mankind. They achieve no marked success, they gain no resplendent victory, They live as the others live--in the fret and expectation of the thing that we choose to call happiness, because it has yet to come. Fenelon incurs the displeasure of the crafty, bigoted king, who, for all his pride, would resent the most trivial offence with the humbleness of humblest vanity; who was great in small things, and petty in all that was great--for such was Louis XIV. Fenelon is condemned, persecuted, exiled. The Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers continue to hold