Читать книгу The Friendships of Women - William Rounseville Alger - Страница 20

THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common, are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood! Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love." Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other. It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.

Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon. Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother, prays to the goddess for pity and help:

For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother

Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee,

And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn

Thy virgin face to his eternal light.

A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song. When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection, were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.

The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing, restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother, though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom." Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them. He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit, which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their characters, that they should have improved the relation under which they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results; how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm, substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed together several of their excellent and most useful literary works. While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a letter in verse to her:

Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,

And paints one darling object unpossessed.

How many years have whirled their rapid course

Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,

In fond affection, as in blood, allied,

Have wandered devious from each other's side,

Allowed to catch alone some transient view,

Scarce long enough to think the vision true!

Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;

While transport yet can swell the beating veins;

While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,

And fancy still retains some genial heat;

When evening bids each busy task be o'er,

Once let us meet again, to part no more!

That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart. There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle, he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all who came between them.

They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded: "Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest, behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,

"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid of a magic mirror."

A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years," Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies, all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and affectionate sincerity of their attachment.

There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.

Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.

The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years

Was with me when a boy.

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,

And humble cares and delicate fears; A

heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love and thought and joy.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until

William's marriage; nor were they parted then.

This plot of orchard-ground is ours:

My trees they are, my sister's flowers.

When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.

At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,

When every day brought with it some new sense

Of exquisite regard for common things,

And all the earth was budding with these gifts

Of more refined humanity, thy breath,

Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,

That went before my step.

She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:

Then it was,

Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,

That the beloved sister, in whose sight

Those days were passed, …

Maintained for me a saving intercourse

With my true self.

Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.

Mine eyes did ne'er

Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind

Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,

But either she, whom now I have, who now

Divides with me that loved abode, was there,

Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,

Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.

The thought of her was like a flash of light,

Or an unseen companionship, a breath

Or fragrance independent of the wind.

The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called

The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame

Over his living head, like heaven, is bent—

An early but enduring monument.

Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England. With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,

When fortune changed, and love fled far,

And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,

Thou wert the solitary star

Which rose, and set not to the last.

The wonderful verses commencing,

Though the day of my destiny's over,

And the star of my fate hath declined,

Thy soft heart refused to discover

The faults which so many could find,

wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,

Thus much I at least may recall:

It hath taught me that what I most cherished

Deserved to be dearest of all.

In the desert a fountain is springing,

In the wide waste there still is a tree,

And a bird in the solitude singing,

Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,

The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;

and ending,

Nor could on earth a spot be found

To nature and to me so dear,

Could thy dear eyes,

In following mine,

Still sweeten more

These banks of Rhine,

expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty, that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them, and repeat them over and over.

One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.

My sister, my sweet sister! if a name

Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.

Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim

No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.

Go where I will, to me thou art the same,

A loved regret which I would not resign.

There yet are two things in my destiny,

A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

I feel almost, at times, as I have felt

In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks,

Which do remember me of where I dwelt

Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books;

Come as of yore upon me, and can melt

My heart with recognition of their looks;

And even, at moments, I could think I see

Some living thing to love, but none like thee.

Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow

The fool of my own wishes, and forget

The solitude which I have vaunted so

Has lost its praise in this but one regret.

The last intelligible words of Byron were,

"Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."

It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister," composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of insanity.

Thou to me didst ever show

Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend

An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,

Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay

But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,

Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude, which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:

Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,

The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.

Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,

Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark

Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed

A sister's tears.

Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.

The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful, like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions, too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London, sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth. Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.

One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave, and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his. They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together, had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in his land:

As one who held herself a part

Of all she saw, and let her heart

Gainst the household bosom lean,

Upon the motley-braided mat

Our youngest and our dearest sat,

Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,

Now bathed within the fadeless green

And holy peace of Paradise.

Oh! looking from some heavenly hill,

Or from the shade of saintly palms,

Or silver reach of river calms,

Do those large eyes behold me still?

With me one little year ago: The chill

weight of the winter snow

For months upon her grave has lain;

And now, when summer south-winds blow

And brier and harebell bloom again,

I tread the pleasant paths we trod,

I see the violet-sprinkled sod

Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak

The hillside flowers she loved to seek,

Yet following me where'er I went,

With dark eyes full of love's content.

The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills

The air with sweetness; all the hills

Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;

But still I wait with ear and eye

For something gone which should be nigh,

A loss in all familiar things,

In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.

And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,

Am I not richer than of old?

Safe in thy immortality,

What change can reach the wealth I hold?

What chance can mar the pearl and gold

Thy love hath left in trust with me?

And while in life's late afternoon,

Where cool and long the shadows grow,

I walk to meet the night that soon

Shall shape and shadow overflow,

I cannot feel that thou art far,

Since near at need the angels are;

And when the sunset gates unbar,

Shall I not see thee waiting stand,

And, white against the evening star,

The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to us shall close this list. Maurice de Guérin was born in Languedoc, in France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although snatched away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are, have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His sister Eugénie, six years older than himself, took the place of mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer. Eugénie's yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters. She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful. God has made our souls of one piece." Maurice's replies were shorter and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret, that Eugénie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he loved her well. But man's love is usually poor compared with woman's; and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers, who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return comparatively so little?

Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections, unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugénie went to him in Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair. After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal, "My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving."

Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he to dying." The shock came upon Eugénie with crushing severity. Ever after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face," "his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling, eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other again on earth?"

Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugénie had begun a journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful, and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure Maurice's fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M. Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guérin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugénie de Guérin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."