Raphael; Or, Pages of the Book of Life at Twenty

by Alphonse de Lamartine

"It is a cruel thought," she added; "for how many blessings, prayers, and tears I should have poured out at His feet since I have loved you! But," she resumed, "I surprise and pain you; pray forgive me. Is not truth the first of virtues, if virtue there be? On this single point we cannot agree; let us never speak of it. You have been brought up by a pious mother, in the midst of a Christian family, and have inhaled with your first breath the holy credulity of your home. You have been led by the hand into the temples; you have been shown images, mysteries, and altars; you have been taught prayers and told, God is here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on your entrance into life; you have retained two weaknesses of intelligence,—mystery and prayer. There is no mystery" she said, in a more solemn tone; "there is only reason, which dispels all mystery! It is man, crafty or credulous man, who invented mystery,—God made reason! And prayer does not exist," she continued mournfully, "for an inflexible law will not relent, and a necessary law cannot be changed.

"The ancients, with that profound wisdom which was often hidden beneath their popular ignorance, knew that full well," she added; "for they prayed to all the gods of their invention, but they never implored the supreme law,—Destiny."

She was silent. "It appears to me," I said after a long pause, "that the teachers who have instilled their wisdom into you have too much subordinated the feeling to the reasoning Being, in their theory of the relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in man,—the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law, must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating him. You do not think Nature a lie," I said smiling,—"you, who said just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever may have been the intention of God in giving those two instincts, mystery and prayer, whether he meant thereby to show that he was the incomprehensible God, and that his name was Mystery; or that he desired that all creatures should give him honor and praise, and that prayer should be the universal incense of nature,—it is most certain that man, when he thinks on God, feels within him two instincts, mystery and adoration. Reason's province," I pursued, "is to enlighten and disperse mystery, more and more every day, but never to dispel it entirely. Prayer is the natural desire of the heart to pour forth unceasingly its supplications, efficacious or not, heard or unheard, as a precious perfume on the feet of God. What matters it if the perfume fall to the ground, or whether it anoint the feet of God? It is always a tribute of weakness, humility, and adoration.

"But who can say that it is ever lost?" I added in the tone of one whose hopes triumph over his doubts; "who can say that prayer, the mysterious communication with invisible Omnipotence, is not in reality the greatest of all the natural or supernatural powers of man? Who can say that the supreme and immortal Will has not ordained from all eternity that prayer should be continually inspired and heard, and that man should thus, by his invocations, participate in the ordering of his own destiny? Who knows whether God, in his love, and perpetual blessing on the beings which emanate from him, has not established this bond with them, as the invisible chain which links the thoughts of all worlds to his? Who knows but that, in his majestic solitude which he peoples alone, he has willed that this living murmur, this continual communing with nature, should ascend and descend continually in all space from him to all the beings that he vivifies and loves, and from those beings to him? At all events, prayer is the highest privilege of man, since it allows him to speak to God. If God were deaf to our prayers, we should still pray; for if in his majesty he would not hear us, still prayer would dignify man."

I saw that my reasonings touched without convincing her, and that the springs of her soul, which science had dried up, had not yet flowed towards God. But love was to soften her religion as it had softened her heart; the delights and anguish of passion were soon to bring forth adoration and prayer, those two perfumes of the souls that burn and languish. The one is full of rapture; the other full of tears,—both are divine!

XXXI.

In the meantime her health improved daily. Happiness, solitude with a beloved companion (that paradise of tender souls), and the daily discovery on her part of some new mystery of thought in me which corresponded to her own nature; the autumnal air in the mountains, which, like stoves heated during summer, preserve the warmth of the sun until the winter snows; our distant excursions to the chalets, or on the waters; the motion of the boat, or the gentle pace of the mules; the milk brought frothing from the pastures in the wooden cups the shepherds carve; and above all, the gentle excitement, the peaceful revery, the continual infatuation of a heart which first love upheld as with wings and led on from thought to thought, from dream to dream, through a new-found heaven,—all seemed to contribute visibly to her recovery. Every day seemed to bring fresh youth; it was as a convalescence of the soul which showed itself on the features. Her face, which had been at first slightly marked round the eyes with those dark and bluish tints which seem like the impress of the fingers of Death, gradually recovered the roundness of the cheek, the mantling blood, the soft down, and blooming complexion of a young girl who has been on the mountains, and whose cheek has been visited by the first cold bracing winds from the glaciers. Her lips had recovered their fulness, her eyes their brightness; the lid no longer drooped, and the eye itself seemed to swim in that continual and luminous mist which rises like a vapor from the burning heart, and is condensed into tears on the eye, whose fire absorbs these tears, that always rise, and never flow. There was more strength in her attitudes, more pliancy in her movements; her step was light and lively as a child's. Whenever we entered the yard of the house on our return from our rambles, the old doctor and his family would express their surprise at the prodigious change that a day had wrought in her appearance, and wonder at the life and light that she seemed to shed around her.

In truth, happiness seemed to encompass her with a radiant atmosphere, in which she not only walked herself, but enveloped all those who looked upon her. This radiance of beauty, this atmosphere of love, are not, as many think, only the fancies of a poet; the poet merely sees more distinctly what escapes the blind or indifferent eye of other men. It has often been said of a lovely woman, that she illumines the darkness of night; it might be said of Julie that she warmed the surrounding air. I lived and moved, enveloped in this warm emanation of her reviving beauty; others but felt it as they passed.

XXXII.

When I was obliged to leave her for a short time, and returned to my room, I felt, even at mid-day, as if I had been immured in a dungeon without air or light. The brightest sun afforded me no light, unless its rays were reflected by her eyes. I admired her more, the more I saw her; and could not believe she was a being of the same order as myself. The divine nature of her love had become a part of the creed of my imagination; and in spirit I was ever prostrate before the being who appeared to me too tender to be a divinity—too divine to be a woman! I sought a name for her, and found none. I called her Mystery, and under that vague and indefinite title, offered her worship which partook of earth by its tenderness, of a dream by its enthusiasm, of reality by her presence, and of heaven by my adoration.