Happiness should be a
prayer--and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protecting
fatherhood of God, appeared to me in all its serious sweetness.
"Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu
C'est la grande science."
July 18, 1858.--To-day I have been deeply moved by the _nostalgia_ of
happiness and by the appeals of memory. My old self, the dreams which
used to haunt me in Germany, passionate impulses, high aspirations, all
revived in me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I should
have missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, lest I should have
buried myself alive, passed through me like a shudder. Thirst for the
unknown, passionate love of life, the yearning for the blue vaults of
the infinite and the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad
ecstasy which the ideal wakens in its beholders--all these carried me
away in a whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. Was it a warning,
a punishment, a temptation? Was it a secret protest, or a violent act of
rebellion on the part of a nature which is unsatisfied?--the last agony
of happiness and of a hope that will not die?
What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book--the first number of the
"_Revue Germanique_." The articles of Dollfus, Renan, Littre, Montegut,
Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me
forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university life.
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