n
various parts of the neighbourhood there has been a terrible cannonade.

Received your letters of the 4th and 6th. They brought me happiness:
they are the true joy of life. I am glad you visited C----. I hope to
write to you at greater length. It is not that I have less leisure than
usual, but I am going through a time when I am less sensible to the
beauty of things. I long for true wisdom. . . .

_December 12, 7 o'clock._

To-day, in spite of the changing beauty of sun and rain, I did not feel
alive to Nature. Yet never was there such grace and goodness in the
skies.

The landscape, with the little bridge and the man on horseback of which
I have told you, softened under the splendour of the clouds. But I had
lapsed from my former sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly
the beauty, all the beauty, of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart.
It told me of fairness that never fails; of the greenness of ivy and the
redness of autumn, the rigidity of winter in the branches;--and then I
understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life,
the very reward of existence, beside which all human expectation is
nothing but a bad dream.

_Sunday, December 13._

. . . After a refreshing night I walked to-day in these woods where for
three months the dead have strewn the ground. To-day the vanishing
autumn displayed its richness, and the same beauty of mossy trunks spoke
to me, as it did yesterday, of eternal joy.

I am sure it needs an enormous effort to feel all this, but it must be
felt if we are to understand how little the general harmony is disturbed
by that which intolerably assails our emotions.

We must feel that all human uprooting is only a little thing, and what
is truly ourselves is the life of the soul.

_December 14_ (splendid weather,
with all the calm returned).

We are still here in the region of the first line, but in a place where
we can lift our heads and behold the charm of my Meusian hills, clearing
in the delicate weather.

Above the village and the orchards I see the lines of birches and firs.
Some have their skeletons coloured with a diaphanous violet marked with
white. Others build up the horizon with stronger lines.

I have been strengthened by the splendid lesson given me by a beautiful
tree during a march. Ah, dear mother, we may all disappear and Nature
will remain, and the gift I had from her of a moment of herself is
enough to justify a whole existence.