remarks has disfigured nature, the fields and the woods above all, where she had influence, were safe. Like Mme. de Sévigné, she would almost have wept to see the face of a country spoiled to maintain the spendthrift proprietor living in the capital. "Here were old woods," writes the marchioness, "and my son on his late journey ordered the last of them to be felled. This is pitiable-he has gained some 400 pistoles, of which he had not a sou left a month after. All these afflicted dryads, all these old sylvans, who knew not whither to retire; all these ancient rooks, established for two hundred years in the horror of these woods; these owls that in the obscurity announce by their sinister cries the misfortunes of all men-all that conspired to raise a lamentation which sensibly affected my heart *." It was just thus that she would have felt. She had the thoughts of a true poet in the woods and fields and gardens, so intense her sensibility and so lively her admiration for the workmanship of God. Others might exclaim, like Mme. de Stael, when the beauties of the country were extolled, "Oh! le ruisseau de la rue du Bac!" She possessed that artistic mind, without which, as the same Topffer says, nature can spread out its beauties, and shine in sunlight while it is neither felt nor expressed. Without being a painter, she possessed that mind, and she received from natural objects an impression of the peaceful, the sweet, the amiable. Only two days before her death, being shown a new painting full of light, which represented the Thames at Halliford, with its willow and its groves, its tall reeds and its swans, it caught her fancy as if she had known the spot, and she said, Oh, how lovely! Won't you keep that picture for me? I love the bright quiet of that peaceful scene." No question, particularly in her latter years, what she delighted in was the quiet which that spot seemed to involve. Her "salon" would be the corner of the field, or the bench in the garden, where, during the last fortnight of her life, opening her heart to some confidential friend, she wept. Still, of course, she would look with rapture at the graceful beauty of the common flowers. A true daughter of the fields, she would inhale with transport the fragrant air that came from them;

*Lett. 631.

but what she prized above all then was silence, quiet, and, though but little advanced in years, even at times solitude. There was a field about half an hour's saunter from this church -there was a seat in the desert part of her grounds at Kensington, where one can never pass now without fancying that one sees her with her book or her chaplet.

"Thither would she tend

Remembering thee, O green and silent dell,
And grateful, that by nature's quietness
And solitary musings, all her heart

Is softened, and made worthy to indulge

Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind."

She was from the same mould as that Mdlle. Angélique Paulet, of whom Mdlle. Scudéry said, "She likes company, but she is never discontented in solitude, and she can amuse herself as well in the country on the banks of a rivulet, and hearing the nightingale, as if the whole court were present*.' Unflinching in the discharge of all her active duties, her cry was no less ever, "Vive le repos de chaque jour! vivent les ombrages de chaque été !” "Sereiner" was a charming French word in the sixteenth century, that seemed made for her lips. "Philosophy," says Montaigne, "doit sereiner les tempêtes de l'ame." She had no tempests in that pure region to appease, and if she had, it was not to philosophy she would have been obliged to have recourse for soothing them. It was not either to indulge in a romantic reverie that she sought this retirement, after the manner of those who wrote shortly before the great French revolution, inviting each other, as in the Soirées Provençales, to separate themselves from the world, to penetrate into what they called, in their unpleasant jargon, "the mysterious asylum of Vaucluse, and there, alone with their memory, to direct for a moment their refreshed imagination, to linger over the charming illusions which compose the fugitive felicity of mortals +." As we have said once before, there was no such stuff in her thoughts. But the repose and peace of nature affected her heart. It was, I repeat it, that she used to feel then, as it were,

*Grand Cyrus.

† Soirées Provençales, tom. i. 19.

more in the company of God. "Why," asks Topffer, "does the aspect of inanimate nature exercise such a charm over minds? Why do they feel when alone with it as if in a crowd? Is it the limpid tint of the air, the brilliancy of colours, the disposition of lines, the glory of light and shade, which cause these transports? Doubtless these have an attraction for the senses, reflecting on thought itself calm and cheerfulness; but it is not by this way that they communicate themselves to the heart. It is that man cannot separate in his thoughts the work from the workman; the created object from the Creator. With great difficulty can that separation be effected, even in the heart of cities, when he stifles his faculties and restrains one by the other. But such is not the condition of the majority. From nature they mount invincibly to its Author. The more they are alone with it, the more they feel Him near them. The greater the silence, the better heard is His voice. No where, then, is this sentiment more powerful than in the rural solitude. No where else is it embellished with such smiling colours, with so much grace, and impregnated with such a calm and charm and happiness!" This quiet of late became also needful to her on another account; for the world in her regard, and since her mother's death, seemed to be following the policy of Agricola in Britain, "et nihil interim quietam pati." Yet it failed; for still she might in this respect have been thought to have sat for her picture to the poet Marvell, where he says—

"Meanwhile, the mind from pleasure less

Withdraws into its happiness,

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.
Here, at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
Her soul into the boughs does glide;
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light."

Of course, as before noticed, she used to be rallied a little for

all this; perhaps even at times reproached for such a love of seclusion. Yet there had never been wanting, at any period, a voice, albeit to most inaudible, that could only find utterance for the secret love and veneration which inspired it, by repeating the lines of the poet which were once to her so applicable,

"Dear child of nature, let them rail!
There is a nest in a green dale,

A harbour and a hold,

Where thou, a wife and friend, shalt see
Thy own delightful days, and be

A light to young and old.

There healthy as a shepherd-boy,

As if thy heritage were joy,

And pleasures were thy trade,

Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,

Shalt show us how divine a thing

A woman may be made."

But it is late to remain here. Let us withdraw in silence.

CHAPTER XI.

,OW the morning light changes the aspect of this chapel, and the stony entrance of this sepulchre, from that which it wore on our last leaving it! What brightness! What cheerful illumination in this place of peace! "Tis an image of the mind that we are about to speak of in regard to its joyful temperament. It would avail, perhaps, but little towards accomplishing any general purpose of recommending with effect a life of faith in any century, to show that it was accompanied with all kind of grace and virtue, if we were to be left under the impression, that after all it was a sad and gloomy life, amerced of that

spirit of "joy and sunny gladness" to which the Psalmist looked forward as actually a consequence of conversion, saying, in the well-known words of the Miserere, “auditui meo dabis gaudium et lætitiam;" for, if men would speak their conscience, there is nothing that can obtain with more facility the secret consent of their will to engage or to persevere in any mode of life than a belief that it will make them cheerful; that instead of proving wearisome, so that a mere narrative of its details would be enough to put them to sleep standing, turning out to be things, as Mme. de Sévigné says, “à dormir débout," it will produce just the contrary effect, and tend to impart that kind of pleasant spirited character which attracts every one who beholds its outward manifestations, while in an humble way, in due subordination to other things, it constitutes, as far as this life is concerned, the most enviable condition to which any one perhaps can aspire. This fact so forcibly presented itself to the mind of a recent apologist and defender of the Christian religion, that he undertakes to disprove the common notion of melancholy being a consequence of embracing it. "The first ages of the Christian era," he says, were marked, it is true, by great calamities. Idolatry rose against Christ, error combated truth, and the blood of martyrs flowed in circuses and on the scaffold. The barbarians invaded Europe; many men fled into the deserts. The sadness which enveloped the world was not produced by religion; this, on the contrary, diffused serenity on the countenance of the martyrs; this sweetened the manners of the barbarians, and vanquished the conquerors; this enabled the anchorites to find peace in privations and exile. Now that these calamities are only memories, and that religion remains to the people whom it has civilized, how ought it not to embellish the existence which in those ages it had rendered supportable! Opening the Gospel, I light on this passage: Come to me, all ye who suffer, and ye will be comforted!' Upon the whole, then, the cause of sadness comes from us, and is in ourselves; and when people say that religion is sad, they impute to it what we should attribute to ourselves, and to ourselves alone *."

66

* Droz, Pensées sur le Christianisme.

J