The men who wrote the three extracts which are given here represent three vividly contrasted types. Ernest Rénan was a distinguished Frenchman, a profound Hebrew scholar, and yet witty, cynical, and eloquent. John Greenleaf Whittier was a Massachusetts Quaker of rustic manners and great simplicity of life, who viewed Nature with the sympathetic eyes of a born poet, but always serious, simple, and sincere. Eugene Field was a Chicago journalist, full of irreverent American humor, rollicking and sometimes boisterous, although he too had a vein of tenderness in his nature and a sympathy with the finer things of life. Yet these three men all agreed in their affection for their sisters. Rénan wrote of his sister Henriette that "it was she who exerted the strongest influence on my life," and at his death he left a little volume containing his reminiscences of her.
It is evident from the dedications of Whittier and Field that each felt an almost equal debt of gratitude to the sisters with whom their early years were spent and whose affection they have so beautifully commemorated.
RÉNAN'S DEDICATION.
(From "The Life of Jesus," by Ernest Rénan. Translated by C.E. Wilbour.
Copyright by George W. Carlton, 1863.)
TO THE PURE SPIRIT OF MY SISTER HENRIETTE, WHO
DIED AT BYBLUS, SEPT. 24, 1861.
Do you remember, from your rest in the bosom of God, those long days at Ghazir, where, alone with you, I wrote these pages, inspired by the scenes we had just traversed? Silent by my side you read every leaf, and copied it as soon as written, while the sea, the villages, the ravines, the mountains were spread out at our feet.
When the overwhelming light of the sun had given place to the innumerable army of stars, your fine and delicate questions, your discreet doubts, brought me back to the sublime object of our common thoughts.
One day you told me you should love this book, first, because it had been written with you, and also because it pleased you. If sometimes you feared for it the narrow judgments of frivolous man, you were always persuaded that spirits truly religious would be pleased with it.
In the midst of these sweet meditations Death struck us both with his wing; the sleep of fever seized us both at the same hour. I woke alone!... You sleep now in the land of Adonis, near the holy Byblus and the sacred waters where the women of the ancient mysteries came to mingle their tears.
Reveal to me, O my good genius, to me whom you loved, those truths which master Death, prevent us from fearing, and make us almost love it.