not to look for a new one. I have only to try to
reconcile two wisdoms. One, which is human, prompts me to cultivate my
happiness, but the other teaches me that human happiness is a most
perishable flower.

We may say: Let us make use of the joys chosen by an upright conscience;
but let us never forget how swiftly these pass.

Yes, the Holy Scriptures contain the finest and most poetical
philosophy. I think they owe it to their affiliation to the oldest
philosophies. There are many disputable things in Edouard Schure, but
what remains is the divination which made him climb through all doctrine
to the infinitely distant Source of human wisdom.

Do you know that those touching traditions of the Good Shepherd and the
Divine Mother, so happily employed in our Christian religions, are the
creations of the oldest symbolism? The Greeks derived them from their
own spiritual ancestors; with them the good shepherd was called Hermes,
the god of the migration of souls. In the same way, the type of our
Madonna is the great Demeter, the mother who bears an infant in her
arms.

One feels that all religions, as they succeeded each other, transmitted
the same body of symbols, renewed each time by humanity's
perpetually-young spirit of poetry.

_December 23_ (in the dark).

I had begun this letter yesterday, when I was forced to leave off. It
was then splendid weather, which has lasted fairly well. But we are now
back again in our first lines. This time we are occupying the village
itself, our pretty Corot village of two months ago. But our outpost is
situated in a house where we are obliged to show no sign of life, so as
to conceal our presence from the enemy. And so here we are at nine
o'clock in the morning, in a darkness that would make it seem to be late
on Christmas eve.

Your dear letter lately received has given me great joy. It is true that
Grace and Inspiration are two names for the same thing.

If you are going to see the pictures of the great poet Gustave Moreau,
you will see a panel called _La vie de l'humanite_ (I believe). It
consists of nine sections in three divisions, called _l'Age d'or, l'Age
d'argent, l'Age de fer_. Above is a pediment from which Christ presides
over this human panorama. But this is where this great genius has the
same intuition as you had: each of the three parts bears the name of a
hero--Adam, Orpheus, and Cain, and each one represents three periods.
Now, the periods of the golden age a