After these heavenly thoughts, dear Kate, I leave you.
August 6, 1868.
I have received your letter, dear sister, joy of my soul, and to-day must not pass away without my writing to you. O deliciosa! I behold
Ireland again, my country, my universe, the first place in my heart, where I have loved my mother and you. O these memories!—the past and present uniting their happiness, their harmonies, and their sweetness.
The house is the same as ever—a bit of heaven fallen upon the earth! Prayed on our dear tombs. The rose-trees flourish which you planted there. The good Reginald does everything as well as possible, as he always does. But oh! to live here without you, to see your room—a reliquary which no one enters without me, and where I have put together whatever belonged to you. Dear, dear Kate, you say well that God has given me other sisters—sisters loving and beloved, but who cannot replace my Kate.
All the village came out to meet us. There were no songs—there were tears: the Irish understand one another. Poor martyr-country! I am seized with a longing desire to stay here to console these poor people. Our dogs were wild with delight, like that of Ulysses. Dear friend and sister, do not be uneasy; that which surmounts all else in my heart is peace, and peace founded on hope, as on a foundation of gold. God will deliver Ireland! He will give us back our forests and our hills, and we shall no more return to the condition of the proscribed. Do you remember the last book we read together, in the great drawing-room on the venerated spot where we used to see our mother? This book is still on a side-table, marked at the last page. It is Rosa Ferrucci, the charming Italian, who so loved Milton. Nothing is changed; the wide meadows, the splendid landscape, the sunsets behind the giants of the park, the gold-dust gleaming through the foliage, the
decline of day which we used so to admire together—I have seen it again in its fantastic magnificence—all is there, even to the smallest tufts of ivy: but the absent and the dead!
“And they also are present,” René assures me. “They wish you to be courageous and truly Christian. Death does not separate souls.”
A fraternal letter from Karl. “My heart feels all the impressions of yours in Ireland. I pray God that he may shed happiness upon your path, and I join in all your memories.”
Isa, Lizzy, Mme. D——, and all our friends must come in turn, and all together. Isa is with me, pale as a marble Madonna, with a heavenly expression in her eyes. Her mother almost adores her, and clings to her in order to live. Mme. D—— fainted away on seeing me. Lizzy has recovered her gayety and petulance, and would fain enliven Isa. Where have I read some words of a Breton who, in speaking of a young girl called to the religious life, says, “Her heart is like a desert”? Such is Isa, athirst for God, in love with the ideal, a soul wounded with the thorny briers of life.