Dans l’ennui de ses jours l’ont bientôt laissé seul!
Adieu, always adieu! It is the cry of earth.
Man in his lonely heart is all regrets:
The traveller’s staff, the veil, and [last] the shroud,
In the weariness of his days, have left him soon alone.
Alone! It is one of the sadnesses of earth. On high is the great meeting again, and the great and eternal happiness!
It is not only the death of the great orator lamented by France which makes me write to you so sadly, dear; it is that Isa has taken the veil, and we are going away. I cannot be so selfish as to consent that my mother should spend a second 1st of January far away from her Brittany, which she loves with the same fondness that I love Ireland,
and I have myself fixed our departure for the 20th—only a week hence! I should like to hold back the sun. We all go to-morrow to Gartan.
Isa is already in heaven; her mother reproaches herself for not having divined her daughter’s longing, and resigns herself to this separation better than I could have believed possible. It is true that Lizzy is all that is delightful, and gives up to her the sweet little Isa almost entirely.
Sarah, the radiant Sarah, came to me yesterday in trouble; her sister writes to her distressing letters. Neither the enchantment of Spain, the brilliant position of her husband, nor the princely state in which she lives are able to satisfy this poor heart, to whom the first condition of human felicity—visible affection—is wanting. This was Sarah’s expression. “I understood her at once,” she said. Another disappointed life, unless, indeed, the dear young wife should courageously accept her trial. Will this ardent, simple, and perhaps too-confiding nature be altogether downcast at finding her hopes deceived, or will she cast herself on God, and serve him in his poor? We must help her to do this, must we not? The Père Charles Perraud, the Lent preacher of two years ago, is preaching the Advent at Sainte-Croix. The Annales quote the following words of Père Gratry: “It was this same Charles Perraud, this being so entirely of the same nature,