ulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for him. Cast
me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
It is table rase he is trying to make of himself, that He might reign
there absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to think, had
made and blest all those things he declined to accept. Deeper and
deeper, then, he retreated into the renuncient life. He could not, had
he wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift--literally a gift
he might have thought it not to be buried but accounted for--the gift
of le beau dire, of writing beautifully. "Il avoit renonce depuis
longtemps aux sciences purement humains." To him who had known them so
well, and as if by intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms of
service might well have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellous
in our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites
heures, the cxviii. of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts now
as but a variety of le neant and vanity of things. He no longer
records, therefore, the mathematical apercus that may visit him; and in
his scruples, his suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as
precisely an inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.

[81] Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, had been
supported, rewarded, by what he believed to be visible miracle among
the strange lights and shades of that retired place. Pascal's niece,
the daughter of Madame Perier, a girl ten years of age, suffered from a
disease of the eyes pronounced to be incurable. The disease was a
peculiarly distressing one, the sort of affliction which, falling on a
young child, may lead one to question the presence of divine justice in
the world, makes one long that miracles were possible. Well! Pascal,
for one, believed that on occasion that profound aspiration had been
followed up by the power desired. A thorn from the crown of Jesus, as
was believed, had been lately brought to the Port-Royal du Faubourg S.
Jacques in Paris, and was one day applied devoutly to the eye of the
suffering child. What followed was an immediate and complete cure,
fully attested by experts. Ah! Thou hast given him his heart's
desire: and hast not denied him the request of his lips. Pascal, and
the young girl herself, faithfully to the end of a long life, believed
the circumstances to have been miraculous. Otherwise, we do not see
that Pascal was ever permitted to enjoy (so to speak) the re