We often went to walk together in the country; we used to stop under the shade of some of those large elms, scattered about in the fields. Leaning against the trunk of one of these trees, my friend used to give me an account of his former travels in England, before the Revolution, and of the verses which he at that time addressed to two young ladies, now mouldering under the shadow of the towers of Westminster,towers which he found standing as he had left them, whilst the illusions and hours of his youth lay buried at their base.

We used to dine in some quiet tavern at Chelsea on the Thames, and enjoyed ourselves with conversing on Milton and Shakspeare; they had seen what we saw; they had sat where we sat on the banks of the river to us a foreign-but to them a native stream. We returned to London at night, by the light of the fading stars, obscured one after another by the haze of the City. We regained our home, guided by the uncertain light which feebly traced out the way through the thickness of the smoke, coloured of a reddish hue around each lamp: thus flows on the poet's life.

We visited London in detail; as an old exile, I acted as cicerone to the new victims of exile, young or old, which the Revolution demanded; there is no legal age for misfortune. During one of these excursions, we were overtaken by a violent thunder-storm, and obliged to seek for shelter in a shabby house, the door of which happened accidentally to be open. We there met the Duc de Bourbon. At this Chantilly, I saw for the first time a prince who was not yet the last of the Condés.

The Duc de Bourbon, Fontanes, and myself, were equally proscribed, and in a foreign land obliged to seek for shelter under an humble roof, against the same storm! Fata viam invenient.

Fontanes was called back to France; he embraced me, with eager wishes for our next and early meeting. When he reached Germany, he wrote me the following letter:

"July 28, 1798.

"If you have felt any regret at my departure from London, I assure you mine has not been less real. You are the second person in whom, during the whole course of my life, I have met with an imagination and a heart completely to my taste. shall never forget the consolation which I have derived from

I

you during my exile in a foreign land. My dearest and most constant thoughts since I took leave of you turn upon the Natchez. What you read to me, especially very lately, is admirable, and will never leave my memory. But the charm of all the poetical ideas with which you impressed me, immediately fled on my arrival in Germany. The most dreadful news from France have followed those with which I made you acquainted on leaving you. I have been kept for five or six days in the most harassing anxiety;-in dread even of persecutions against my family. My fears are to-day greatly diminished. The evil has been but very slight ;-the threat greater than the blow;-and the exterminators wished for people of a different date from mine. The last courier has brought me assurance of peace and good-will. I can continue my journey, and I propose to set out early in the ensuing month. My abode will be fixed near the forest of St. Germain-among my family, Greece, and my books-would I could also say the Natchez! The unexpected storm which has just burst upon Paris, has been caused, I am certain, by the blunders of the agents and chiefs with whom you are acquainted. I have a clear proof of it in my hands. On coming to this conclusion, I wrote to Great Pulteney Street (where M. du Theil lived) with all possible politeness, but also with all that circumspection which prudence demands. I wish to avoid all correspondence, at least just now, and I remain in the greatest doubt what I ought to do, and what place of sojourn I ought to choose.

"I still speak of you with the accents of friendship, and wish, from the bottom of my heart, that any hopes of usefulness which may rest upon me may serve to keep alive those kindly feelings which have been ascribed to me, and which are so fully due to your person and your distinguished talents. Work-work, my dear friend, become illustrious, and you can do so; the future belongs to you. I hope the promise so often made by the Comptroller-General of Finance has been, at least in part, kept. That part consoles me, for I cannot bear the idea of a fine work being stopped for want of some pecuniary aid. Write to me; let our hearts communicate, and our muses be always friends. Be assured, that as soon as I can go about freely in my native land, I shall prepare for you a hive and flowers beside my own. My attachment is unalterable. I shall be alone as long as I am not near you. Tell me

about your studies; I wish to congratulate you on completing your work: I have composed the half of a new poem on the banks of the Elbe, and am more satisfied with it than with all the others.

“Adieu, I embrace you tenderly, and remain your friend, "FONTANES."

Fontanes informs me that he is composing verses on changing his exile. A poet never can be deprived of every thing; he carries his lyre along with him. Leave the swan her wingsevery evening some unknown river will repeat the melodious lamentations which she would rather have sung on the Eurotas.

The future is yours: did Fontanes here speak truly ?—— ought I to congratulate myself on his prediction? Alas!-the future there announced is now become the past. Shall I have another?

This first and affecting letter which I ever received from the first friend whom I had in my life, and who, since the date of that letter, has walked twenty-three years by my side, gives me mournful warning of my progressive isolation. Fontanes is no more deep sorrow for the tragical death of a son brought him to an early grave. Almost all those of whom I have spoken in these memoirs have disappeared from the stage of life; and I keep merely an obituary register. Yet a few years, and I myself, condemned to catalogue the dead, shall leave no one behind to inscribe my name in the book of the departed.

But if I must remain alone, and none who loved me shall survive to conduct me to my last asylum, I have still less need than others of a guide; I have examined the way, and studied the places through which I must pass; I have desired to see what takes place at the last moment. Oftentimes, standing by the side of a grave into which the coffin has been let down by cords, I have listened to the rattling of these cords; then came the sound of the first shovelful of earth thrown upon the coffin; at every succeeding cast the hollow sound diminished, and the earth, in filling up the grave, by degrees, caused eternal silence to ascend to the surface of the tomb.

Fontanes! you have written may our muses be always friends: to me you have not written in vain.

London, April to September, 1822.

DEATH OF MY MOTHER-RETURN TO RELIGION.

Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem ?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,

Aspiciam post hac ? at, certe, semper amabo!

"Shall I speak to thee no more? Shall I never hear thy words? Shall I never see thee, oh! brother dearer than my life? Ah! I shall ever love thee!"

I HAVE just lost a friend, and am about to lose a mother: the verses addressed by Catullus to his brother are constantly applicable. In our valley of tears, as in the infernal regions, there is the constant murmur of an eternal plaint, forming the ground-work, or principal note, of human lamentations; it never ceases, and would continue should all created griefs be silent.

A letter from Julie, which I received a short time after that from Fontanes, confirms my sad remark on my progressive isolation. Fontanes urged me to work, to become distinguished; my sister begged me to give up writing altogether: the one proposed fame to me, the other oblivion. You have seen in Madame de Farcy's history that such was the tendency of her ideas; she had conceived a hatred to literature, because she regarded it as one of the temptations of her life.

When you

"St. Servan, July 1st, 1793. "My brother, we have just lost the best of mothers; it is with sorrow that I announce this severe blow. cease to be the object of our solicitude we shall have ceased to live. If you knew how many tears your errors have caused our dear mother to shed, how deplorable they appear to any one of a thinking mind, to any one who lays claim, not only to piety, but to reason; if you knew this, it would perhaps help to open your eyes, to make you give up writing; and should Heaven, touched by our prayers, permit us to meet again, you would find amongst us all the happiness that can be enjoyed on earth; and you would bring happiness to us, since none exists for us while you are absent, and while we have reason to be uneasy on your account."

Ah! why did I not follow the impulse of my heart? why did I continue to write? Had my writings never come to light, would there have been any difference in the events or spirit of the century?

I had then lost my mother; and I had embittered her last hour! While she, with her last breath, was uttering a prayer for her only remaining son, what was that son doing in London? I was perhaps taking a walk on a fresh morning, while the death-damp was on my mother's brow, and my hand was not there to wipe it away! The filial tenderness which I had always preserved for Madame de Chateaubriand was very profound. My childhood and youth were intimately associated with my mother's image; all that I knew I had learned from her. The idea of having poisoned the last days of her who had given me life, threw me into despair; I flung the copies of the Essai with horror into the fire, as the instruments of my crime; if it had been in my power to annihilate the work, I would have done it without hesitation. I did not recover from this distracted state of mind, until the thought occurred to me that I might expiate this first work by one of a religious character, such was the origin of the Génie du Christianisme.

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My mother," I said, in the first preface to this work, "after having been thrown, at the age of seventy-two, into a dungeon, where she witnessed the death of some of her children, expired at length on a pallet, to which her misfortunes had consigned her. The thought of my errors greatly embittered her last days, and on her death-bed she charged one of my sisters to reclaim me to the religion in which I had been educated. My sister communicated my mother's last wish to me. When this letter reached me in my exile, my sister herself was no more; she, too, had sunk beneath the effects of her imprisonment. These two voices, coming, as it were, from the grave-the dead interpreting the dead-had a powerful effect on me. I became a Christian. I did not, indeed, yield to any great supernatural light; my conviction came from the heart; I wept, and believed."

I exaggerated my fault; the Essai was not an impious. book, but a book of doubt and grief. Through the darkness of this work still gleams a ray of the Christian light which beamed on my cradle. No great effort was needed to return from the scepticism of the Essai to the certainty of the Génie du Christianisme.