bility has worn me out, to no purpose. Now, indeed, I am at peace within, but my career is over, my strength is running out, and my life is near its end.

‘Il n'est plus temps pour rien excepté pour mourir.'

This is why I can look at it all historically.

23d January 1881. — A tolerable night, but this morning the cough has been frightful. Beautiful weather, the windows ablaze with sunshine. With my feet on the fender I have just finished the newspaper.

At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me that my doom should be so near. Life has no sense of kinship with death. This is why, no doubt, a sort of mechanical instinctive hope is for ever springing up afresh in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the verdict of science. All life is tenacious and persistent. It is like the parrot in the fable, who, at the very moment when its neck is being wrung, still repeats with its last breath

'Cela, cela, ne sera rien.'

The intellect puts the matter at its worst, but the animal protests. It will not be

lieve in the evil till it comes. Ought one to regret it? Probably not. It is Nature's will that life should defend itself against death; hope is only the love of life; it is an organic impulse which religion has taken under its protection. Who knows? God, may save us, may work a miracle. Besides, are we ever sure that there is no remedy? Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. We reckon the doubtful among the chances in our favour. Mortal frailty clings to every support. How be angry with it for so doing?

Even with all possible aids it hardly ever escapes desolation and distress. The supreme solution is, and always will be, to see in necessity the fatherly will of God, and so to submit ourselves and bear our cross bravely, as an offering to the Arbiter of human destiny. The soldier does not dispute the order given him: he obeys and dies without murmuring. If he waited to understand the use of his sacrifice, where would his submission be?

It occurred to me this morning how little we know of each other's physical troubles; even those nearest and dearest to us know nothing of our conversations with the King of Terrors. There are thoughts which brook no confidant; there are griefs which

cannot be shared. Consideration for others even bids us conceal them. We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty.

'Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science Qui nous met en repos.'

None of us can escape the play of contrary impulse; but as soon as the soul has once recognised the order of things, and submitted itself thereto, then all is well.

'Comme un sage mourant puissions nous dire en paix :

J'ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais:

Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe.'

28th January 1881.-A terrible night. For three or four hours I struggled against suffocation and looked death in the face. . . . It is clear that what awaits me is suffocation - asphyxia. I shall die by choking.

I should not have chosen such a death;

but when there is no option, one must simply resign oneself, and at once. . . . Spinoza expired in the presence of the doctor whom he had sent for. I must familiarise myself with the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled by laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by his kneeling family is more beautiful: my fate indeed lacks beauty, grandeur, poetry; but stoicism consists in renunciation. Abstine et sustine.

I must remember besides that I have faithful friends; it is better not to torment them. The last journey is only made more painful by scenes and lamentations: one word is worth all others -Thy will, not mine, be done!' Leibnitz was accompanied to the grave by his servant only. The loneliness of the deathbed and the tomb is not an evil. The great mystery cannot be shared. The dialogue between the soul and the King of Terrors needs no witnesses. It is the living who cling to the thought of last greetings. And, after all, no one knows exactly what is reserved for him. What will be will be. We have but to say, 'Amen.'

4th February 1881.

It is a strange sen

sation that of laying oneself down to rest with the thought that perhaps one will never see the morrow. Yesterday I felt it strongly, and yet here I am. Humility is made easy by the sense of excessive frailty, but cuts away all ambition.

'Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.'

A long piece of work seems absurd — one lives but from day to day.

When a man can no longer look forward in imagination to five years, a year, a month, of free activity, - when he is reduced to counting the hours, and to seeing in the coming night the threat of an unknown fate, it is plain that he must give up art, science, and politics, and that he must be content to hold converse with himself, the one possibility which is his till the end. Inward soliloquy is the only resource of the condemned man whose execution is delayed. He withdraws upon the fastnesses of conscience. His spiritual force no longer radiates outwardly; it is consumed in selfstudy. Action is cut off — only contemplation remains. He still writes to those who have claims upon him, but he bids farewell to the public, and retreats into himself. Like the hare, he comes back to die in his