I enjoy it an instant with delight. I go, I come, I make my six steps in every direction, on the flag stones of my narrow chamber; I examine one or two portraits suspended on the walls, images a thousand times better painted within myself; I speak to them; I speak to my dog, who follows with an intelligent and inquiet eye all my movements of thought and of body. Sometimes I fall on my knees before one of these dear memorials of the dead; oftener I walk, raising my soul to the Creator, and articulating some fragments of prayers which our mother taught us in our infancy, and some stanzas of psalms of the sacred Hebrew poet, which I have heard in the cathedrals, and which float about here and there in my memory, like the wandering notes of a forgotten air.

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This done, (and should not every thing begin and finish with that?) I seat myself at the old oak table, where my father and my grandfather have sat before me. It is covered with books, worn and defaced by them and by myself. Their old Bible, a large quarto Petrarch, a Venitian edition in two enormous volumes, where his latin works, his politics, his philosophy, his Africa, take two thousand pages, and where his immortal sonnets cover but seven-perfect image of the vanity and uncertainty of the labor of the man who passes his life, in raising an immense and elaborate monument to his memory, of which posterity saves but a little stone to make for him glory and immortality-a Homer, a Virgil, a volume of the letters of Cicero, a torn volume of Chateaubriand, of Goethe, of Byron, all, philosophers or poets, and a little "Imitation of Jesus Christ," the philosophic breviary of my pious mother which preserves the traces of her fingers, sometimes of her tears, and a few notes of her's, and which to her contained inore philosophy and poetry, than all the philosophers and poets. In the midst of all these dusty and scattered volumes, some leaves of fine white paper, some pencils and pens, invite me to draw and to write. My elbow supported on the table, and my head on my hand, my heart big with sentiments and remembrances, the thoughts full of vague images, the senses in repose or sadly soothed by the grand murmurs of the forests, which come rolling and dying away over my windows, I yield myself up to all my dreams; I feel all, I think of all, I negligently twirl a pencil in my hand, I sketch some odd images of trees, or of ships on a sheet of white paper; the progress of thought stops, as the wa'ers in the bed of a river too full; the sentiments accumulate, they demand agress in some form or other; I say to myself, Write. As I do not know how to write in prose, for want of frame and habit, I write in verse. I pass several hours, sweetly pouring out on paper, in metres which mark the cadence and movement of the soul, the sentiments, ideas, remembrances, sorrows and impressions of which I am full. I read several times to myself these harmonious confessions of my own revery; most of the time I leave them unfinished, and tear them up after having written them.

They belong but to myself, they could not be read by others; it would not be perhaps the most poetical of my poesy, but what matters that? All that man feels and thinks most strongly and most beautifully, are they not the confidings which he makes to love, or the prayers which he whispers to God? Does he write them? No; doubtless the eye or the ear of man would profane them. That which is best in our heart, never comes out of it.

A few of these morning poems are finished however; these are those which you know, the Meditations, the Harmonies, Jocelyn, and these pieces without name which I send you. You know how I wrote them, you know how much I appreciate them for their small value; you know how incapable I am of the painful labor of the file and the critic on myself. Blame me, but accuse me not, and in return for too much abandon and weakness, give me too much mercy and indulgence-Naturam sequere.

The hours which I can give thus to these drops of poetry, the real dew of my autumn mornings, are not long. The bell of the village soon sounds the Ave Maria with the twilight; we hear in the pebbly pathways which ascend to the church or the castle, the noise of the wooden shoes of the peasants, the bleating of flocks, the barking of the shepherds' dogs, and the jolts of the wheels of the plough on the furrow frozen by the night; the stir of day commences around me, seizes me and drags me away until evening. The workmen mount my wooden stairs, and ask me to trace for them the work for the day; the curate comes and solicits me to provide for his sick or his schools; the mayor comes and desires me to explain to him the confused text of a new law on the neighboring roads, a law which I have made, and which I understand no better than himself. The neighbors come and summon me to go with them to trace the line which bounds an estate; my vine-dressers come to inform me that the harvest is lost, and that there remains to them each but one or two sacks of rye to nourish a wife and five children during a long winter; the courier arrives laden with journals and letters, which fall like a rain of words upon my table, words sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, oftener indifferent, but which demand each a thought, a word, a line. My guests, if I have any, arise and wander about the house, others arrive and attach their weary horses to the iron bars of the low windows. These are the farmers of our mountains in waistcoats of black velvet and leathern gaiters, the mayors of the neighboring villages, the good old curates crowned with white hairs, shining with sweat; poor widows of the nearest cities who would be happy to have a post officer or a clock-bell, who believe in the omnipotence of a man of whom the journal of the chief city has spoken, and who hold themselves timidly back under the great lindens of the avenue with one or two children by the hand. Each one has his care, his dream, his business; it is necessary to hear them, press the hand of one, write a note for

another, give some hope to all. All that is effected over the corner of my table, loaded with verse, with prose, and letters, a piece of bread of our fragrant mountain rye, seasoned with fresh butter, with some garden fruit, and a cluster from the vine, the frugal breakfast of the poet and the laborer, of which the birds await the crumbs on my balcony. Twelve o'clock strikes; I hear my horses champing, neighing, and pawing the sand of the court, as if to call

I say good morning and good bye to the guests of the house who remain until evening. I mount the horse and set out upon a canter, leaving behind me all the thoughts of the morning to follow after the other cares of the day. I plunge into the deep and steep paths of our valleys; I clamber up our mountains and descend them to climb up again; I attach my horse firmly to the tree; knock at several doors; I find again here and there a thousand affairs to accomplish for myself and others, and I return not until night, after having relished during six or seven hours the solitary roads, all the rays of the sun, all the tints of the yellow and fading leaves, all the odors, all the gay or sorrowful sounds of our magnificent landscapes in the days of autumn-happy, if in returning, harassed and fatigued, I find by chance at the corner of the fire, som friend arrived during my absence, with a simple heart, and a poetic soul, who in going to Italy or Switzerland, has remembered that my roof was near his way, end who, like Hugo, Nodier, Quinet, Sue, or Manzoni, comes to bring us a distant echo of the noise of the world, and taste with indulgence a little of our peace.

Behold, my dear friend, the best part of the life of the year for me. May God increase it, and be thanked for this little salt with which he has seasoned it; but these days fly away with the rapidity of the last rays which gild, through the mists, the tops of the young poplars of our meadows.

Some morning the journal announces that the chambers are convoked for the middle or the end of December. From this day, all joy of the hearth and all peace vanish; it is necessary to prepare for this long domestic interregnum which this absence produces in a rural household, to provide for the necessities of Saint-Point, and for those of an onerous sojourn of six months at Paris, res augustæ uomi. I must set out.

I well know that they say to me, "Why do you go away? Why not remain in your quietude of poet, and let the political world labor for you?" Yes, I know that they say that to me; but I reply not; I pity them who say it. If I mingled with politics from pleasure or vanity, they would have reason; but if I mingle with it as all the passengers in a great tempest put their hands to the ropes, they are wrong. I would love better to sing to the sun on the deck, but it is necessary to mount to the yard, and take a reef or loosen a sail. Social labor is the daily and inevitable duty of every man who participates in the perils or the benefits of society. They have a singular idea of politics in our country, and in our

times. Ah, has it no influence on the world for you or me, to know to what poor and fleeting individualities may belong many years of power? What imports it to the future that this or that year of the government of a little country called France has been marked by the consulate of these or those men? This is the business of their petty glory; this is the business of the one who makes the calendar. But it is important to us to know if the social world advances or retrogrades in its way, for the time; if the education of mankind, which has been so badly neglected until now, is promoted by liberty or despotism; if the legislations will be the expression of the right and duty of all, or of the tyranny of a few; if they can teach humanity to govern itself more by virtue than by force; finally if they can introduce in the political relations of men and nations, that divine principle of fraternity which has fallen from heaven upon earth, to destroy all servitude, and to sanctify all disciplines; if they abolish legal murder; if they can efface by degrees from the code of nations, the murder in masses, which men call war; finally, if men would govern themselves in families, instead of herding like flocks; if the holy liberty of conscience would expand with the lights of reason, multiplied by the word; and if God, reflecting himself there more from century to century, will be from century to century better glorified in works and in words, in spirit and in truth.

Such is politics as we understand it, you, myself, many others, and almost all the youth who are born in the tempests, who grow strong in the struggle, and who seem to have within them the instinct of great things, which must be gradually and religiously accomplished. Believe you that in such an epoch, and amid such problems, honor and virtue will put themselves aside in the little troop of skeptics, and say like Montaigne, "What do I know?" or like the egotist, "What do I care?"

No. When the Divine Judge arraigns us before our conscience at the end of our short journey here below, our modesty, our feebleness, will be no excuse for our inaction We shall have to reply to him, "We were nothing, we could do nothing, we were but a grain of sand." He will say, "I have put before you in your time the two scales of a balance, where were weighed the destinies of humanity; in the one was the good, in the other the evil. You were only a grain of sand, without doubt, but who said to you that this grain of sand would not cause the balance to incline on my side? You had an intelligence to see, a conscience to choose; you should have put this grain of sand in one or the other; you have put it nowhere; what has it been worth? it has served neither you nor your brethren."

I wish not, my dear friend, to cause this sad reply to egotism, to be made to me, and this is why I terminate so hastily this scrawl, and bid you adieu. DE LAMARTINE.

Saint-Point, Dec. 1st 1838.