Margaret leaves to-morrow; she is gone to say good-by to her poor people. What a kind, sweet friend she is! and now the ocean is soon to separate us.
Pray for the travellers, beloved Kate, and for your own Georgina.
This autumn set in icy cold; to-day the weather has been mild and the sun splendid; it was like a resurrection; my spirit revived with nature. How I miss Margaret! She has had a prosperous journey. “The aspect of everything is changed.” God be praised!
A kind visit this morning from a neighbor, the Baroness de T——, mother of three sweet children, whom she brings up herself. This charming woman is in deep mourning for her brother; riches are no shield from the unlooked-for strokes of death. In positions where people are in possession of everything, it must be dreadful suffering to be helpless to detain here below, at the price of all one’s gold, those who are carried off by death. We are said to be on the point of a grievous and terrible crisis; I can easily believe it; it is the general expectation of minds. Everything suffers; all families are stricken in those dearest to them, all is trouble and distress. M. V. R. is dead at Dublin, without confession, without hope, without God! Is there no angel for these poor wanderers, to make one ray of light shine before their eyes? Nelly, the mourning Nelly, confides her grief to me: “What a night of anguish! and what tears I shed! No priest beside this dying bed; my mother in despair, I on my knees, my eyes dried up with weeping, doubting if it were a dream or a reality, and wondering whether so many ardent prayers must be in vain! The only religious ornament in the room was a little picture I had drawn when a child, and which my poor uncle had not observed, or else tolerated it on my account; its subject was the conversion of a sinner. This seemed to me providential. I could not
believe that this life, so troublous, so agitated, and so sinful, so far from God and from the practice of religion, could go out without one spark of divine light to illuminate it, or without some thought of penitence finding entrance, which might obtain pardon before eternity.… Alas! I have but one hope, and I cling to that in the fulness of my trouble like one who is shipwrecked to a fragment of the vessel; it is that, in passing judgment on a soul, God is mindful of all the prayers that will be offered for it!”
Poor Nelly! how well I understand her. I hope, I hope; who knows what passes in that supreme moment, in that terrible grappling of death with life, between divine mercy and the sinner, who may in one instant make an act of perfect contrition and love?
Would you like to have a page out of Hélène’s journal, the receptacle of her inmost and most secret confidences, which she left with her mother, and which René and I read with enthusiasm? “‘Knowest thou the land where the orange tree blossoms?’ was the vague question of the melancholy Mignon to all around him; and I, for my part, ask everywhere, ‘Knowest thou the land whither flows all my love? Knowest thou the land to which mount my desires? Knowest thou Carmel, the sacred mountain where I shall possess my God?’ I also could say, “Knowest thou this beloved home, where I have so often sat with gladness in my heart? Knowest thou this mother who loves me with so true a love, this father so fond and tender, these kind, indulgent brothers, this noble-hearted grandmother, all this charming family who have made my life so sweet and golden?… O nature! and I am about to leave all these! I
communicated this morning, the Feast of St. Teresa, the illustrious and seraphic lover of God, the fairest flower of Carmel, the glory of the church, a soul so strong and lofty in her perfection that she no longer desired any happiness in this world, and repeated, ‘Lord, let me suffer or die!’ Edouard Turquety, the sweet Catholic poet, has written some beautiful verses on this sublime thought. O great St. Teresa, eagle of love! whose flight reached to such heights, draw me after you; detach me from earth, gain for me that I forget for God all which is not God!
“‘Emporte-moi, douce pensée,