her. No doubt she, too, is dead ere this, and another sleeps in her
bed at the hospital."




PRAYER ON THE ACROPOLIS.


It was not until I was well advanced in life that I began to have any
souvenirs. The imperious necessity which compelled me during my early
years to solve for myself, not with the leisurely deliberation of the
thinker, but with the feverish ardour of one who has to struggle for
life, the loftiest problems of philosophy and religion never left me
a quarter of an hour's leisure to look behind me. Afterwards dragged
into the current of the century in which I lived, and concerning which
I was in complete ignorance, there was suddenly disclosed to my gaze a
spectacle as novel to me as the society of Saturn or Venus would be
to any one landed in those planets. It struck me as being paltry and
morally inferior to what I had seen at Issy and St. Sulpice; though
the great scientific and critical attainments of men like Eugéne
Burnouf, the brilliant conversation of M. Cousin, and the revival
brought about by Germany in nearly all the historical sciences,
coupled with my travels and the fever of production, carried me away
and prevented me from meditating on the years which were already
relegated to what seemed like a distant past. My residence in Syria
tended still further to obliterate my early recollections. The new
sensations which I experienced there, the glimpses which I caught of
a divine world, so different from our frigid and sombre countries,
absorbed my whole being. My dreams were haunted for a time by the