Narrative Poems, part 3, Barclay of Ury etc | Page 5

were still at church. J. J. Rousseau proposed to me to offer up our devotions. The hermits were reciting the Litanies of Providence, which are remarkably beautiful. After we had addressed our prayers to God, and the hermits were proceeding to the refectory, Rousseau said to me, with his heart overflowing, 'At this moment I experience what is said in the gospel: Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. There is here a feeling of peace and happiness which penetrates the soul.' I said, 'If Finelon had lived, you would have been a Catholic.' He exclaimed, with tears in his eyes, 'Oh, if Finelon were alive, I would struggle to get into his service, even as a lackey!'" In my sketch of Saint Pierre, it will be seen that I have somewhat antedated the period of his old age. At that time he was not probably more than fifty. In describing him, I have by no means exaggerated his own history of his mental condition at the period of the story. In the fragmentary Sequel to his Studies of Nature, he thus speaks of himself: "The ingratitude of those of whom I had deserved kindness, unexpected family misfortunes, the total loss of my small patrimony through enterprises solely undertaken for the benefit of my country, the debts under which I lay oppressed, the blasting of all my hopes,--these combined calamities made dreadful inroads upon my health and reason. . . . I found it impossible to continue in a room where there was company, especially if the doors were shut. I could not even cross an alley in a public garden, if several persons had got together in it. When alone, my malady subsided. I felt myself likewise at ease in places where I saw children only. At the sight of any one walking up to the place where I was, I felt my whole frame agitated, and retired. I often said to myself, 'My sole study has been to merit well of mankind; why do I fear them?'"
He attributes his improved health of mind and body to the counsels of his friend, J. J. Rousseau. "I renounced," says he, "my books. I threw my eyes upon the works of nature, which spake to all my senses a language which neither time nor nations have it in their power to alter. Thenceforth my histories and my journals were the herbage of the fields and meadows. My thoughts did not go forth painfully after them, as in the case of human systems; but their thoughts, under a thousand engaging forms, quietly sought me. In these I studied, without effort, the laws of that Universal Wisdom which had surrounded me from the cradle, but on which heretofore I had bestowed little attention."
Speaking of Rousseau, he says: "I derived inexpressible satisfaction from his society. What I prized still more than his genius was his probity. He was one of the few literary characters, tried in the furnace of affliction, to whom you could, with perfect security, confide your most secret thoughts. . . . Even when he deviated, and became the victim of himself or of others, he could forget his own misery in devotion to the welfare of mankind. He was uniformly the advocate of the miserable. There might be inscribed on his tomb these affecting words from that Book of which he carried always about him some select passages, during the last years of his life: 'His sins, which are many, are forgiven, for he loved much.'"
"I DO believe, and yet, in grief,?I pray for help to unbelief;?For needful strength aside to lay?The daily cumberings of my way.
"I 'm sick at heart of craft and cant,?Sick of the crazed enthusiast's rant,?Profession's smooth hypocrisies,?And creeds of iron, and lives of ease.
"I ponder o'er the sacred word,?I read the record of our Lord;?And, weak and troubled, envy them?Who touched His seamless garment's hem;
"Who saw the tears of love He wept?Above the grave where Lazarus slept;?And heard, amidst the shadows dim?Of Olivet, His evening hymn.
"How blessed the swineherd's low estate,?The beggar crouching at the gate,?The leper loathly and abhorred,?Whose eyes of flesh beheld the Lord!
"O sacred soil His sandals pressed!?Sweet fountains of His noonday rest!?O light and air of Palestine,?Impregnate with His life divine!
"Oh, bear me thither! Let me look?On Siloa's pool, and Kedron's brook;?Kneel at Gethsemane, and by?Gennesaret walk, before I die!
"Methinks this cold and northern night?Would melt before that Orient light;?And, wet by Hermon's dew and rain,?My childhood's faith revive again!"
So spake my friend, one autumn day,?Where the still river slid away?Beneath us, and above the brown?Red curtains of the woods shut down.
Then said I,--for I could not brook?The mute appealing of his look,--?"I, too, am weak, and faith is small,?And