discouraged even then, I implored the help of my sisters, to whom I
always wrote on their birthdays and fete-days with the persistence of
a neglected child; but it was all in vain. As the day for the
distribution of prizes approached I redoubled my entreaties, and told
of my expected triumphs. Misled by my parents' silence, I expected
them with a beating heart. I told my schoolfellows they were coming;
and then, when the old porter's step sounded in the corridors as he
called my happy comrades one by one to receive their friends, I was
sick with expectation. Never did that old man call my name!

One day, when I accused myself to my confessor of having cursed my
life, he pointed to the skies, where grew, he said, the promised palm
for the "Beati qui lugent" of the Saviour. From the period of my first
communion I flung myself into the mysterious depths of prayer,
attracted to religious ideas whose moral fairyland so fascinates young
spirits. Burning with ardent faith, I prayed to God to renew in my
behalf the miracles I had read of in martyrology. At five years of age
I fled to my star; at twelve I took refuge in the sanctuary. My
ecstasy brought dreams unspeakable, which fed my imagination, fostered
my susceptibilities, and strengthened my thinking powers. I have often
attributed those sublime visions to the guardian angel charged with
moulding my spirit to its divine destiny; they endowed my soul with
the faculty of seeing the inner soul of things; they prepared my heart
for the magic craft which makes a man a poet when the fatal power is
his to compare what he feels within him with reality,--the great
things aimed for with the small things gained. Those visions wrote
upon my brain a book in which I read that which I must voice; they
laid upon my lips the coal of utterance.

My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the