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GUÉRIN, GEORGES-MAURICE and EUGÉNIE DE, whose Journals and Letters have endeared their names to the masters of criticism, were born of an ancient and noble, but poor, French family at the ancestral château of Le Cayla, in Languedoc -Eugénie in 1805, and her brother on August 5, 1810. Maurice died there July 19, 1839, and was followed to the grave by his sister in 1848. After going to school at Toulouse and studying in Paris, Maurice attached himself to the monastic society that was gathered round the Abbé Lamennais at La Chênaie, in Brittany, in 1832. Having remained there for a year, he returned to Paris, taking little further interest in the monastery after the Abbé's own departure. In Paris he tried to support himself by teaching, and writing for the papers and magazines, employments for which he was singularly unsuited. In 1838 he married a rich Creole, but the seeds of a fatal consumption were already developing, and the next year he went to his home in Languedoc to die. Excepting a short "prose poem," called the Centaur, he left little behind him that seemed even intended to endure; but in his journal and letters we find a rare sympathy and intimacy with nature, combined with an almost unequal power in her interpretation.

Eugénie's place in literature has been deter

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mined by the spiritual interest and perfect style of her journal, which remains a permanent record of her love for her brother and the high purity of her Catholicism. The Reliquia of Georges-Maurice de Guérin, containing a few poems, his journals, and a number of his letters, edited by his friend M. Trébutien, with a notice of the author by Sainte-Beuve, appeared in 1861; and the Journal et Lettres of Eugénie was published the following year, and was crowned by the Académie Française.

The Edinburgh Review speaks of Eugénie as "an Antigone of France sublimed and ennobled by the Christian faith;" and of her journal as "the outpouring of one of the purest and most saintly minds that ever existed upon earth."

THE CENTAUR'S YOUTH.

Wandering at my own will like the rivers, feeling wherever I went the presence of Cybele, whether in the beds of the valleys or on the height of the mountains, I bounded whither I would, like a blind and chainless life. But when Night, filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on the slope of the mountain, she guided me to the mouth of the caverns, and there tranquillized me as she tranquillizes the billows of the sea. Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden within the cave and my head under the open sky, I watched the spectacle of the dark. The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their palaces. under the deep; they seat themselves on the promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed sea. My regards had free range, and travelled in the most distant points. Like sea-beaches which never lose their wetness, the line of mountains to the west retained the imprint of gleams

not perfectly wiped out by the shadows. In that quarter still survived, in pale clearness, mountain summits naked and pure. There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend, ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities; or I saw pass some mountain-nymph charm-struck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to view among the far off constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming forests.

Thou pursuest after wisdom, O Melampus, which is the science of the will of the gods; and thou roamest from people to people like a mortal driven by the destinies. In the times when I kept my night watches before the caverns, I have sometimes believed that I was about to surprise the thought of the sleeping Cybele, and that the mother of the gods, betrayed by her dreams, would let fall some of her secrets; but I have never made out more than sounds, which faded away in the murmur of night, or words inarticulate as the bubbling of the rivers. From the Centaur ; translated by MATTHEW ARNOLD.

WINTER EVENING ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.

All the sky is covered over with gray clouds just silvered at the edges. The sun, who departed a few moments ago, has left behind him enough light to temper for awhile the black shadows, and to soften down, as it were, the approach of night. The winds are hushed, and the tranquil Ocean sends up to me, when I go out on the doorstep to listen, only a melodious murmur, which dies away in the soul like a beautiful wave on the beach. The birds, the first to obey the nocturnal influence, make their way toward the woods, and you can hear the rustle of their wings in the clouds. The copses which cover the whole hillside of Le Val, which all the day-time are alive with the chirp of the wren, the laughing whistle of the woodpecker, and the different notes of a multitude of birds, have no longer any sound in their paths and thickets, unless it be the prolonged high calls of the blackbirds at play with one another and chasing one another, after all the other birds have their heads safe under their wings. The noise of man, always the

last to be silent, dies gradually out over the face of the fields. The general murmur fades away, and one hears hardly a sound except what comes from the villages and hamlets, in which, up till far into the night, there are cries of children and barking of dogs. Silence wraps me round; everything seeks repose except this pen of mine, which perhaps disturbs the rest of some living atom asleep in a crease of my note-book, for it makes its light scratching as it puts down these idle thoughts. Let it stop, then! for all I write, have written, or shall write, will never be worth setting against the sleep of atom.-From Maurice's Journal; translated for Fraser's Magazine.

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THE BROTHER'S DEATH.

No, my beloved one, death shall not separate us, it shall not remove you from my thoughts. Death separates only the body; the soul, in place of being there, is in Heaven, and this change of dwelling takes away nothing from its affections. O, my friend, Maurice, Maurice, are you far from me? Do you hear me? What are those regions where you now are? What is God, so beautiful, so good, who makes you happy by His ineffable presence, unveiling for you eternity? You see what I wait for, you possess what I hope for, you know what I believe. Mysteries of the other world, how profound you are, how terrible you are, but how sweet you sometimes are! yes, very sweet, when I think that Heaven is the place of happiness. All my life will be a life of mourning, with a widowed heart, without intimate union. I love Marie, and my surviving brother much, but it is not with our sympathy.From Eugénie's Journal; translated for the Edinburgh Review.

GUERNSEY, ALFRED HUDSON, an American historian and biographer, born at Brandon, Vt., in 1828. After receiving a common-school education, he became clerk in a village store, where he had access to a good library of English books. He then studied at the Oneida Institute, a manual-labor school near Utica, N. Y., connected with which was a printing-office, where he learned type-setting. Four years afterward he entered the Union Theological Seminary, New York, supporting himself by occasionally working at his trade. After graduating, he entered the employment of Harper & Brothers as a corrector of the press, and became one of their literary advisers. When Harper's Magazine was started he went upon its editorial staff, where he remained nearly twenty years, contributing numerous articles, and writing the "Monthly" Record of Current Events. In 1873 he became an associate editor of Appleton's American Cyclopædia, to which he contributed many articles in History and Biography, including nearly all of those relating to the Civil War in the United States. The publishers of THE UNIVERSITY OF LITERATURE have, by special arrangement, availed themselves of much valuable matter formerly published in Alden's Cyclopædia of Universal Literature, which was edited mainly by Mr. Guernsey, and which is now out of print. Besides editorial work,

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