sia to the celebrated shrine of Kerbela

in Turkish territory. Persia Our policy in has been, throughout the whole of this generation, one of peace. We have shown no desire to annex any portion of the Persian dominions; we have no territorial ambition. Our only desire in Persia is to strengthen the hands of His Majesty the Shah, and to work in accord with him for the advantage and regeneration of his country; and the Persians know this very well. They know this as well as the Ameer of Afghanistan knows it with regard to his country, and although their fear of outside pressure may induce them sometimes to be swayed by other influences, yet in their hearts they know that the best friends of both Persia and Afghanistan are the English people and the English Government. We are now in a somewhat anxious position so far as the outside The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review.

we

world is concerned, and doubtless our difficulties and reverses-because have had no defeats-our reverses in South Africa have had a disquieting effect, not only in, but throughout, the East. That time, we hope and trust, is past, and I have little doubt, as I have never doubted for a moment since war was declared, that the result of this campaign will be to leave us far stronger, in every sense of the word, than we were before; and that, not only in Persia, but in the rest of the world, it will be acknowledged that the power that could, at so short a notice, place 200,000 men in the heart of South Africa, with its difficult communications and its long sea-voyage, could, if occasion required, make a far greater effort, and place a far larger number of men in any quarter of the world where its. vital interests were assailed.

Lepel Griffin.

Eugénie de Guérin was descended from an old and distinguished family. De Guérins had fought in the Crusades; a de Guérin of the 9th century was Count of Auvergne, and they ranked among their members á cardinal, and, as Eugénie tells with pardonable pride, that Bishop of Senlis, whose name is honorably remembered in connection with the battle of Bovines, and they were besides allied by marriage with some of the best families of noble France. But if sometimes prosperous and always distinguished, in later years they had too often but little of which to boast but that they were lords of themselves-"a heritage of woe." "Poverty and misfortune are hereditary in my family, and the majority of

my relations have died in trouble," wrote Maurice de Guérin in 1838; and although this statement may owe something to the exaggeration of a morbid soul, Eugénie's father was certainly richer in ancestors than in the more tangible goods of this world.

Her home-her only home, and one from which she seldom strayed-was the chateau of le Cayla, among the gray flats of Languedoc. "Why," she asks wistfully, "have castles always been feared?" "Un de ces petits disait à sa grand'mère, qui parlait de venir ici: 'Minino ne vas pas à ce castel, il y a une prison noire.'" She describes the surrounding country as a great empty desert: her life as one of "profond et complet isolement."

But there are

country sounds to break the solitude; some which have long since ceased seem still to come to us as we readharvestmen singing at their work, the measured rhythm of the flail, little peasant children playing as near the old house as they may. There are woods, too, and distant blue hills, and great stretches of corn land for which the district is still renowned, seas of gold she somewhere calls them; and there are stretches of green pasture land with their snepherds, their sheep, their soft yellow-coated cattle with mild eyes. A road, too, seems to run near the castle, for in the web of her journal she delights to weave many of the passing sights-a wedding, a funeral, a countryman with his cart, whistling as he goes.

In front of the house is a terrace with steps leading down to the garden and to the green valley through which a rivulet is flowing. The sound of that rivulet is always in our ears as we read the journal; the air is full of the scent of lilacs, of acacia flowers, of birds' voices. On the terrace doves are cooing; in the summer nightingales are heard from the near wood, swallows are everywhere, grasshoppers are singing; and even in winter there are the rooks. All are loved by Eugénie; the arrival of the wagtails, of the swallows, is an event to the recluse in the old house.

That house is monastic in its aspect, and although M. de Guérin makes improvements after his fancy, takes away the blanc pigeonnier, symbol of seigneurie, and builds great salons with modern windows, there seems to be very little furniture to put in them and very few guests to occupy them. "Our rooms are all white," she says; "there are no mirrors, there is nothing luxurious. The dining-room has a sideboard and chairs, and a great table, and two windows which look out to the wood on the north, the beechwood where quaint

Pierril seeks for truffles with his 'petit cochon.' In the salon there is a sofa, a round table, some straw-bottomed chairs, an old armchair with a tapestry cover, and from this room two glass doors open on to the terrace where the lilies grow. It is all white, ascetic in its plainness, a fit environment for the white soul whose cloister it is. And the life lived in it is so simple too; plain living and high thinking have always some mysterious affinity.

"I must note in passing," she writes to Maurice one April evening at eight o'clock, "an excellent supper we have been having, papa, Mimi, and I, at the corner of the kitchen fire, with the servants' soup, boiled potatoes, and a cake I made yesterday. We had no servants but the dogs, Lion, Wolf and Trilby

. . all our people are at church, at the instruction for confirmation which is given every evening. This repast by the fireside, among the dogs and cats, was charming. It only wanted the song of the cricket and, you to make the charm complete. Is this enough prattle for to-day?"

M.

We have spoken of le Cayla as a cloister, but as we have seen, Eugénie was not its only inhabitant. Her mother was dead, had died when Maurice was seven and Eugénie thirteen, but M. de Guérin still lived on in the old house, and with him his eldest son, Erembert, another daughter Marie, the Mimi of the Journal, and Eugénie. de Guérin's personality is a singularly attractive one: sensitive, affectionate. "Voilà papa, qui vient de me visiter dans ma chambre, et m'a laissé en s'en allant deux baisers sur le front," she writes one day. He has all the instincts of the old noblesse from whom he is descended; all the traditions of the old régime which was vanishing or had vanished, but he is poor! His daughter, too, inherits some of his fastidious spirit.

"As I went downstairs," she records on May 10, 1837, "with a coal scuttle, papa said he did not like to see me do those things; but I have been thinking of Saint Bonaventura, who was washing up in his convent when they brought him, I believe, a cardinal's hat. In this world there is nothing low but sin, which degrades us in the eyes of God. Thus my coal scuttle gave me a salutary thought which will make me do without distaste certain distasteful things such as blacking my hands in the kitchen."

And she does more than carry coals and superintend the cook. "A day spent in hanging out linen to dry gives me little to say," she tells Maurice. But even in such an occupation she finds beauty, and thoughts, for with her thoughts spring up everywhere. "It is, however, pretty to stretch the white linen on the grass, or to see it floating on the line. On these occasions one is, if one pleases, the Nausicaa of Homer, or one of the Bible princesses who washed the tunics of their brothers."

In such things as these her days passed. A journey now and then to Alby or to Toulouse, two short visits to Paris and to the Nivernaise, that almost enchanted forest land of France, visits few and far between from Maurice for travelling costs moneythese are the only events of her life. She commenced her journal in 1834; in 1839 Maurice died, but she wrote on until the end of 1841. In 1848, she, too, was in her grave.

Thus briefly we have sketched Eugénie's surroundings and her life history; her Journal will reveal herself to us. In it is found one of the most intimate relations of a soul which the world possesses; intimate and truthful because sane as well as ingenuous. As we read it we are at once confronted by that strength and quietude, that forcefulness joined to the most subtle

refinement which, to whatever source we may ascribe it, is the peculiar heritage of holy souls. The deep religious feeling, the (to borrow a word) theopathic temperament of which every line speaks, has to be taken into account as we consider this life. Such a life is a phenomenon which can no more be passed over or left out of the calculations of those who think than can some physical fact on which great issues of thought depend and on which judgment must be passed. Some men will call the life unnatural; I prefer to call it supernatural, for only by so considering it can the full beauty of the thing be revealed to us. In such a life is found a key to the problem of the universe which no physicist can supply; and it is a form of argument which will be more and more considered and taken into account, and which already, to many minds, carries more conivction than the shifting dicta of scientists can do.

Matthew Arnold indeed seemed surprised that this holy and beautiful soul does not reach the ideal at which she aims, that we sometimes miss the sweetness and calm of a St. Francis de Sales or a Fenélon, or the radiant ecstasy of a St. Theresa. But the journal of even a saint would not be free from trace of ἔσωθεν φόβοι. Saints in this world do not

wear a crown

Within whose circuit is Elysium And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.

And a saint, in the technical sense of the word, Eugénie de Guérin was not; she was only that by no means contemptible thing, a good woman, whose every thought on things which are seen ends in a sigh towards the things which are not seen. That she had a drawing towards the religious life is certain, and in that life she would no

doubt have reached nearer to her ideal. She was the stuff of which the religious are made; and possibly the loss of one on whom she looked with even warmer affection than to her brother Maurice, early turned her thoughts from the world. But circumstances were adverse. She never left le Cayla, and her sturdy common sense knew that there is an economy in spiritual things; that a Saint Theresa would have been out of place except in her convent. And besides the common sense of her own keen intelligence, which could see all round a subject without weariness and without bias, Eugénie had been nursed in a system which, however we may regard it, possesses the supreme secret of imparting not only a finish, but a sanity which is as remarkable to the souls with whom it deals.

But there is one aspect of the journal, which, as it is the great source of charm in the book, cannot be altogether overlooked-its felicity of language, independent of the beautiful thought which the language clothes. The form which Eugénie de Guérin's work took was no doubt conducive to that quiet style of writing in which French authors have always excelled and which, indeed, they may be said to have created, a style full of fastidiousness and a "civil-suited" spirit, but yet free from the least hint of laborious finish. She is never "in company" when she writes; is always at her ease-velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim credebat libris. And, like Comper, she is one of a band who need no incident to make their pages brilliant. Like Cowper, she has nothing to record; nothing but la pluie et le beau temps of an uneventful life and the beatings of her own too sensitive heart. Her days are gray as a November twilight, but she can make us read page after page of her immortal journal with infinite delight, because she can transform and transfigure

things commonplace and limited into thing of grace and sublimity; can find in them some thought which lifts them out of the dust of things ordinary, and can clothe both the thought and the circumstance which gave rise to it in the most felicitous words.

We have likened her to Cowper because both occupy somewhat the same path in literature; both have the gift of making dull things brilliant. But Eugénie is marvellously superior. She has the power of condensation, while he sometimes draws out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument; and in those concise gems of thought in which she approaches Pascal, he is altogether deficient. With some men reason may be in the minds, not in words; but she can shape her reason into convincing words -clear, energetic, without effort. Like Pater's Marius, she has the word, the phrase, which conveys to others the mood or the thought so vividly real within herself; with him she has the apprehension of the nature of the thing which she is about to express, and the words follow that naturally. And here we may well liken her to Pascal, of whom Dean Church, himself a remarkable example of the gift which he ascribes to another, has said, "In no writer since the great Greek masterpieces has the 'beauty, born' of simplicity and truthfulness passed so 'profusely' into style; a perpetual witness to all who hold a pen against the dishonesty of conventional and affected words, warning them of the first duty of that exact agreement of word and meaning, of that sincerity of the writer with himself as well as with his readers, 'ce consentement de Vous avec vous-même,' out of which as a principle of composition, Pascal's excellence grew."

And, with all her mental gifts, there is nothing harsh, unfeminine about her. She loves the birds, the flowers, les

petits, to speak in her own graceful tongue, with all a mother's gentle

heart.

"The shepherd told me this morning," she writes one March day, "that the wagtails had arrived; one had followed

the flock all day. This is a good sign; we shall soon see the flowers! They say these birds bring good luck to the flocks. The shepherds reverence them as genii, and will not kill one. If such a misfortune does happen, the best sheep of the flock will die. I wish this naïve credulity would preserve other little birds which our peasants kill so unmercifully, and have given me so much sorrow before now. The misfortunes of the nests was one of my childish sorrows. I thought of the mothers, of the little ones, and it desolated me not to be able to protect them."

Thus she loved the birds, and a visit from a child is a delight to her in that grim old castle looking out on the glooming flats. "I love children as I love poor old people," she writes one day, and then describes one who comes to see her.

"He wants to see everything, to know everything . . . he made me take down my guitar which hung on the wall, to see what it was; he put his little hand on the strings and was enchanted to hear it sound. 'What is there there that sings like that?' he asked. The wind which whistled loud at the window astonished him too; my room was to him an enchanted place, scmething he will remember long, as I should if I had seen the palace of Armidius. . . . I watched him with infinite pleasure, delighted in my turn with the charms of childhood. What must a mother feel for these gracious creatures!"

And she possesses too the poet's true recognition of beauty in little and often unnoticed things; the power of seizing on the exact charm of some trifle which would be passed over unseen by those

destitute of the inward eye which was to her, indeed, the bliss of solitude. We rise from her book with the feeling with which we rise from a volume of Wordsworth. Our eyes are opened not only to see what they were too apt to miss before, but to see things in a different aspect. A primrose by the river's brim is something more than a primrose; the glory and the gleam comes to it or comes back to it.

Let me transcribe, as an example of her joy in little things, a passage which shows what visions the kitchen fire-a prosaic spot to most minds--had for her.

When the rain is falling gently it is pleasant to sit at the side of the fire and take the tongs and make the sparks fly! This has been my amusement for a whole hour; I love it; the sparks are so beautiful, they are the flowers of the fireplace. Truly there are charming things in the ashes, and when I am not busy I amuse myself with watching the phantasmagoria of the hearth. There are a thousand little figures in the em'bers which go and come, change, disappear, spring up-sometimes angels, sometimes demons with their horns, children, old people, butterflies, dogs, sparrows; one sees them all under the burning log. I remember a figure with an air of celestial suffering, which seemed to me a soul in purgatory. I was struck with it, and wished to have a painter at my side; never was vision more perfect. Observe the burning logs and you will acknowledge they are beautiful things, and that unless one is blind one cannot weary before a fire. Listen, above all, to the soft murmurs which come sometimes from the midst of the embers like a singing voice. Nothing is sweeter or more pure; one would say that it was some little spirit of the fire which sings. See, mon ami, my evenings and their happinesses; then sleep, which is not the least!

The journal lends itself to quotation. The thought is so concentrated, so rapidly expressed, the beauties are SO