which he was trained. He followed the same course with Petrarch, Pascal, and scores of other examples of unhappy genius in modern times. Their panacea was selfcontempt, detachment, denial, annihilation. Our desires torment us: let us renounce them, destroy them, die out of ourselves into a patient waiting for God to redeem us in eternity! "My God!" exclaims Guérin, “what I suffer from life! not in its accidents, a little philosophy suffices there; but in its very substance. As I go on in age, my spirit drops a thousand spoils upon its path, ties break, prejudices fall, I begin to show my head above the flood; but existence itself remains bound, - always the same dolorous point marking the centre from the circumference. O Stoicism! founded to combat grief by firmness of soul, who only knewest to combat life by death, we have not yet gone a single step beyond thee." But surely death is not the cure for the ills of life: it is their close. The genuine remedy for the disturbances of the soul is the healthy attunement of the discordant faculties and forces of the soul. Not denial, but fulfilment, is the real key to content. The genius of the Christian period is characterized by an unprecedented development of sensibility, sensibility to finer and larger standards of good. Now, the keener, the more numerous, the wider the ranks and ranges of obligation and desire of which the soul is susceptible, so much the greater its exposures to confusion, interior conflict, fermentation, in a word, unhappiness. Sympathy is the crude material of our moral nature. All the standards of good which sympathy can recognize are elementary powers to be taken up and organized into a firm and mature conscience. Then a stable self-consistency and concord will result. Human life is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations with external relations," or the reflection of nature in us. The attempt to invert it, and make nature reflect us, adjust her laws to our desires, must lead to misery. The purpose of human life is the fruition of the functions of our being in proper co-ordination. Let any man fulfil the functions of all his faculties in their due hierarchical order, and he will be happy, because there will be no war in him. Interior unison, self-respect, and complacency are the indispensable foundations of happiness, though they are not attainable while nebulous expanses of sympathy are floating, meteoric masses of passion darting about, in the soul. state worse. When Maurice de Guérin strove to escape his misery by denying his ambition, scourging down his aspirations, and courting an apathetic resignation, he only made his His true refuge would have been harmony and fulfilment, with quiet submission to the inevitable. "I die secretly every day my life escapes through invisible pricks. Some one told me that contempt for mankind would carry me far; yes, and especially if sourness mingles with it. Every profession disgusts, every object fatigues me. I am irritated with the men who are still children. I hate myself in these miseries, which give me the most violent desires to leap on a free shore, and spurn the hateful boat that bears me. I laugh my pretensions to scorn. I scoff at my imagination, which, like the tortoise, would journey through the air. I ridicule the superb ego which vainly kicks against the goads of interior sarcasm. I bite myself, as the scorpion in the brazier, to end more quickly." If he could have ceased to think upon himself so disatisfiedly, broken the gnawing bondage of self-consciousness, and rested calmly in a contemplation of the everlasting laws of beauty, goodness, and joy on which all creation reposes, he would have lost his misery. There was no other cure. In such occasional passages as the following, he appears himself to have seen this: "My God! how we distress ourselves with our isolation! I was a long time possessed by this madness. It was because I lived wrongly, and established false relations between creatures and my soul, that I suffered so much, and that the creation repelled me from its joys. I wasted myself in a profound solitude: the earth seemed to me worse than a desert isle all naked in the bosom of a savage ocean. was a silence to make one afraid. Madness, pure madness! There is no isolation for him who knows how to It take his place in the universal harmony, and to open his soul to all the impressions of this harmony. Then one comes to feel, almost physically, that one lives for God and in God." One half the soul of Maurice de Guérin alone was partly plunged in evil; the other half ever remained inaccessible to stains, high and calm, amassing drop by drop the poetry he hoped afterwards to shed on the world. The beauty of his descriptions of nature is almost unapproachable. The many paragraphs from his pen on friendship have a tone of penetrative sincerity and sweetness. The sufferings incident to his over-sensitive spirit plaintively reconcile us to the earliness of his death. One easily transfers to him the anecdote he has related of his master Lamennais. On a summer day the mournful prophet sat with Maurice under two Scotch firs, behind the chapel at La Chênaie. Drawing with his staff the form of a grave in the turf, he said, "It is there that I wish to rest; but no sepulchral stone, only a bank of grass. O, how well I shall be there!" He teaches us, both by what he has written and by what he was, many a striking lesson from which souls finely made and finely exposed may profit. He was one of those mentally impassioned persons, not physically impassioned, the victims of consumption, who appeal so profoundly to our sympathy; whose lungs, material and spiritual, seem woven of a texture so gauzy that the common air of life works on it like a corrosive fire, who need the more distilled and aromatic breath of love to sustain and feed them, and who fade away into the one great good of eternity, with outstretched arms and vain longings after the many little goods of time. HEGEL. THE great philosophers leading an absorbed inner life, with their metaphysical systems, bodies of thought hopelessly unintelligible to ordinary minds, form a class of lonely men. Such was Heraclitus, nicknamed the dark, declaring that nothing is, but that all flows; in other words, that being is not a station but a motion; a perpetual becoming: so that no one ever crosses the same stream, or sees the same picture, twice. Such was Pythagoras, with his esoteric mathematics, his secret society, his long novitiate of silence, occult instructions and signs. Such was Parmenides, with his unfathomable propounding of the One. Such were Plotinus and Proclus, with their super-refinement of bewildering speculations as to the phenomenal and the real, the transient and the eternal, multiplicity and unity. Such were the unknown founders of the oriental idealism, whose view of things was an intellectual alkahest, melting the universe into an idea. Such were the mystics, like Dschelaleddin Rumy, to whom the whole of things was an intoxicating dream, or a vision of self-identifying bliss. It is clear enough that not one out of millions can enter appreciatingly into the mood expressed in the following lines: The Loved One bears the cup, and sells annihilation; He comes, He comes, a flood of molten music round him gushing; - all veils are raised, the universe lies blushing. I snatch the cup, and, lipless, quaff the Godhead's liquor, And into unity of bliss the self-lights flicker. It is probable that still fewer are capable of understanding the absolute idealism of Hegel. His learning is so vast, his analysis so remorseless, his abstractions so transcendental, his terminology so abstrusely knotty, his synthesis so all-comprehensive, that his system is the standing scandal of students, baffling all but the very bestequipped and toughest thinkers. He claims to have made metaphysics an exhaustive science, a closed circle of circles. He begins with Being as the absolute Affirmation, and Nothing as the absolute Negation, and shows their identity in Becoming. He proceeds, through a constant reconciliation of the contradictory pairs between which alone thought can exist, to the conclusion that the All is a thought, and that every genuine thought which penetrates to know itself is the All. It is, whether true or false, in subtilty and comprehensiveness as tremendous a piece of thinking as was ever performed by a human head. The popular inability to comprehend what he said left him by himself. He declared, "Only one man understands me, and he misunderstands me." To master his system requires as special an intelligence and training as to master the Fluxions of Newton, and in a far higher degree. Yet those least fitted to judge are frequently the readiest to assume superiority, and to name his industry charlatanry or folly. No one who is yet lingering in rudimentary arithmetic will presume to call the geometrical calculus an empty imposition; he knows it to be unmeaning only to his ignorance. But it is quite customary for one who in philosophy has not finished simple numeration to stigmatize the metaphysical calculus of Hegel as little better than idiotic jargon. Common sense, which is the rule of mental averages, seeing how far he varies from it, complacently considers him a fool. No wonder his speech is cutting and caustic with irony towards the intellectual pigmies who stumble at his outworks, and fancy themselves stalking above him when really dealing with their own dwarfed reflections of him. His system may be illegitimate science, it is certainly fruitful gymnastics, a tremendous regimen of mental enlargement, mental emancipation, mental enrichment. The complacency of those who have neither taste nor faculty for such studies, nor modesty to feel their failure, often leads them to stigmatize him as an impostor and his product as emptiness. But he, meanwhile, where is he? Occupied with his own indomitable effort to understand everything, to leave absolutely no mystery uncleared, to know even God himself, he is "out in the void desert, separated from the world of man by endless days and nights, and eternally recurrent and repeating solitudes, lonely, mysterious, inexplicable, a giant dreamland, where the sense of Being and the sense of Nothing, like two boundless vapors confronting each other, the infinite vaporous warp and the infinite vaporous woof, melting, interpenetrating, wave and weave together, waft and waver apart, to wave and |