day, these unequal and dying lights of a boreal night, mysteries which I know not how to define, and which explain to me the mythology of the North. I can now understand all the superstitions of the Scandinavians. God hides himself in the light of the pole as much as he manifests himself in the blazing noon-tide of the tropics. All places and all climates are beautiful in the eyes of the wise man who seeks only in creation to discover the
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Creator. To whatever corner of the earth the restlessness of my heart may impel my steps, it is ever the same God whom I admire, the same voice that I interrogate. Wherever man casts clown a religious eye, he recognises in nature, a body of which God is the soul. The spectre of a sleeping city reminds me of that ballad of Coleridge, in which the English seaman beholds the phantom of a vessel gliding across the sea. These nocturnal illusions are to the inhabitants of the polar regions what the Fata Morgana, in broad day, is to the men of the South : the colours, the lines, and the hour are different; the illusion is the same.
In contemplating with emotion one of the countries of the earth in which nature is the most naked, and where she is considered the least worthy of admiration, I love to dwell upon the consolatory idea that God has dispensed to each point of the globe beauties that enable his children to recognise Him everywhere by indubitable signs, and to recognise also that they owe Him thanks, in whatever zones his providence may have called them to live. The features of the Creator are imprinted upon every portion of the earth, which is thus rendered sacred to the eye of man. Each locality has its soul, according to the poetical expression of Jocelyn. I can never tire of a scene which speaks to me. It may be the same burden unceasingly repeated, yet each time it conveys the idea of something new. The lessons that I can thus draw, suffice for the modest aspirations of my life. A taste for travel is, with me, neither a pretence, a fashion, nor a consolation. I am born a traveller as others are born diplomatists: - To me, my country is every spot
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that I admire, every place in which I recognise God in his works; and of all the works of God, that which I understand the most easily is the aspect of nature, and its affinities with the creations of art. God there reveals himself to my soul through the indefinable relations established between His eternal Word and the fugitive thoughts of man. This contemplation, ever the same, yet ever new, is the food of my mind, the secret and the apology of my life ; it employs both my moral and my intellectual powers ; it occupies my time, and absorbs my spirit. Yes, in the melancholy yet delicious isolation to which my vocation as pilgrim condemns me, curiosity takes the place of ambition, power, standing and career. These reveries, lam aware, do not belong to my years. M. de Chateaubriand was too great a poet to describe to us a Rene growing old. The lassitudes of youth excite sympathy: its future supplies the place of energy and of hope; but the resignation of Rene* grown hoary would scarcely add to eloquence. The Site of myself, an humble gleaner in the field of poetry, is to show how a man grows old who was born to die young : a subject more sad than interesting, an ungrateful task. Nevertheless, I will say everything without timidity and without scruple, because I affect nothing. Called by my character, which has made my destiny, to contemplate the life of others rather than to live myself, if I were to be refused the privilege of reverie, under pretext that I have enjoyed too long this intoxication of children and of poets, I should be robbed before the time of the gift which God had imparted for my existence. But what would become of society, it may be said, if every one acted
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as I do ? Strange fear of the votaries of the age ! They are ever dreading lest their idol should be abandoned. I do not propose to preach to them, and yet I would recal to the minds of these enlightened beings, that the worst of all the forms of intolerance is the intolerance of philosophy.
I cannot live the life of the world because its interests, its objects, or, at least, the means it employs to defend and to attain them, present nothing that might inspire me with that salutary emulation without which a man is conquered in the very outset of those struggles of ambition or of virtue which consti-tute the life of society. There, success is involved in the working out of two conflicting problems ; to conquer our rivals, and to make those rivals proclaim our victory. Herein lies the difficulty of obtaining a conquest, and the, almost, impossibility of maintaining it.
I renounced the aim even before the age of discouragement. Since the day for ceasing to struggle must soon close, I had better not commence it. It was thus that my heart spake, as I called to mind the beautiful expression, ?? All that ends is short.' Under this feeling I suffered to pass by, without envy as without contempt, the train of bold and ardent jostlers who believe that the world is theirs because they are the world's.
Suffer me then to make my escape, without allowing yourselves to fear that eager combatants will ever be wanted in the struggles of this world, and allow me to extract all the advantage that I am able out of my leisure and my indifference ; besides, may not inaction be only apparent,, and may not the intellect profit by
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its liberty to observe more attentively, and to refleet with less distraction ?
The man who observes society from a distance is more lucid in his judgments than he who exposes himself, throughout his life, to the rough contact of the political machine. Men of action observe only by memory, and think only of describing when they have retired from the scene; and then, soured by disappointment, or feeling their end approaching, fatigued, or still a prey to fits of hope, the futile return of which is an inexhaustible source of deception, they almost always keep to themselves the treasures of their experience.
Had I been taken to Petersburg by the course of business, should I have seen in so short a time the reverse of things as I now see it ? Shut up in the circles of diplomatists, I should have surveyed this land from their point of view, I should have devoted all my thoughts to the affair in hand, I should have been interested in conciliating their good will by the utmost facility of manners; and all this management could not have operated for any length of time without reacting upon the judgment of him who was under its constraint. I should have ended by persuading myself that on many points I thought as they thought, were it only to excuse myself in my own eyes for the weakness of speaking as they spoke. Opinions that you dare not refute, however ill-founded you may find them at first, will finally modify your own; when politeness is carried so far as to become blindly tolerant, it is a treason against self; it perverts the views of the observer, whose business it is to represent persons and things not as he would have
LITERARY CANDOUR.
