To him, upon a secret and woodland shrine, she sacrificed, not by slaying, but by setting free; and when a bird released upon his altar lingered for a moment among the branches of the shadowing mapletree, she took the sign as a token of Corambé's acceptance of the benign and bloodless offering-and those who like may fancy that some power was there to welcome the unblemished gift, and to fill with gladness that innocent sanctuary in the heart of a child.

But the little Aurore grew older, and was sent to the convent of the Anglaises at Paris, where Catholicism was presented in its most winning form by the religious English ladies, to whom the education of some of the best-born girls in France and in our own islands was at that time entrusted. For a long time Aurore withstood their influence; she became the ringleader of all such wild and innocent mischief as the convent knew; she was enrolled among the diables; she seemed as far as possible from becoming sage.

But her hour came-the hour which in some form or other probably comes to every ardent and reverent soul-the hour of the dedication of self to a new-felt and absorbing power.

In a fit of weariness, after some long frolic, she had strayed into the convent chapel. She sat through the evening service, in a state of strange abstraction and serenity. What followed shall be described in her own words:

:-

L'heure s'avançait, la prière était sonnée, on allait fermer l'église. J'avais tout oublié. Je ne sais ce qui se passait en moi. Je respirais une atmosphère d'une suavité indicible, et je la respirais par l'âme plus encore que par les sens. Tout à coup je ne sais quel ébranlement se produisit dans tout mon être, un vertige passe devant mes yeux comme une lueur blanche dont je me sens enveloppée. Je crois entendre une voix murmurer à mon oreille: Tolle, lege. Je me retourne, croyant que c'est Marie Alicia qui me parle. J'étais seule.

Je ne me fis pas d'orgueilleuse illusion, je ne crus point à un miracle. Je me rendis fort bien compte de l'espèce d'hallucination où j'étais tombée. Je n'en fus ni enivrée ni effrayée. Je ne cherchais ni à l'augmenter ni à m'y soustraire. Seule ment, je sentis que la foi s'emparait de moi, comme je l'avais souhaité, par le cœur. J'en fus si reconnaissante, si ravie, qu'un torrent de larmes inonde mon visage. Je sentis encore que j'aimais Dieu, que ma pensée embrassait et acceptait pleinement cet idéal de justice, de tendresse et de sainteté que je n'avais jamais révoqué en doute, mais avec lequel je ne m'étais jamais trouvée en communication directe; je sentis enfin cette communication s'établir soudainement, comme si un obstacle invincible se fût abîmé entre le foyer d'ardeur infinie et le feu assoupi dans mon âme. Je voyais un chemin vaste, immense, sans bornes, s'ouvrir devant moi; je brûlais de m'y élancer. Je n'étais plus retenue par aucun doute, par aucune froideur. La crainte d'avoir à me reprendre, à railler en moi-même au lendemain la fougue de cet entraînement ne me vint pas seulement à la pensée. J'étais de ceux qui vont sans regarder derrière eux, qui hésitent longtemps devant un certain Rubicon à passer, mais qui, en touchant la rive, ne voient déjà plus celle qu'ils viennent de quitter.

Her conversion was complete. It was followed by months of ecstatic happiness and self-denial, and only the wise reluctance of

the nuns in charge prevented the enthusiastic girl from insisting on taking the veil. At last her grandmother removed her from the convent. But her faith and her wish to become a nun persisted long. Her first shock arose from the perusal of Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, a book recommended to her by her confessor, but which she found to be in so direct an opposition to the Imitatio Christi, on which her devotion had long been fed, that she was led to doubt the truth and unity of a system which could thus be authoritatively expounded in two such different senses. But she seemed to be gliding gently into a tranquil Theism, when all at once her troubles came. Her grandmother died. Her home at Nohant was broken up. Her father's family were alienated by her mother's temper. Her mother was worse than no guardian to the sensitive and inexperienced girl. In her distress and loneliness she allowed a M. Dudevant to persuade her that he would be a solid and lasting friend. She married him, and thus committed the greatest blunder of her life, not through excess, but through defect of emotional sensibility. For she should never have married M. Dudevant. She never loved him, and he never loved anybody. He drank; he kept low company; he was openly unfaithful to his wife. After years of miserable union, and years of informal separation, the wife procured a judicial separation, and the custody of the children was left in her hands. But during the wretched years, from 1826 to 1836,-years during which other sins besides those of M. Dudevant disturbed her inward peace, and, enlightened by her own sorrows, her eyes opened upon the sorrows of the world, her faith was deeply shaken; she lost her trust in the moral government of the universe; her spiritual life became a mere voice of protest and cry for light to a sealed and unanswering heaven.

Slowly the answer came.

By-and-by [says Mazzini] her thoughts elevate and clear themselves: her looks turn oftener to the future; the religious sentiment, so prominent in George Sand, becomes more and more developed and intense. The turbid stream purifies itself in mounting towards heaven, and falls again in dew. Calm succeeds to storm; the very shadow of scepticism has disappeared before faith; faith, sad and without the spring of youth, for its torch does not shine on this side of the tomb; but strong, and unshakeable as all religious conviction. Our earthly life is not the Right to happiness, it is the Duty of development; sorrow is not Evil, since it stimulates and purifies: virtue is constancy in devotion; all error passes away; truth is eternal, and must, by a law of Providence, triumph sooner or later in the individual as in humanity. George Sand has learnt these things, and repeats them to us with the sweet and impressive voice of a sister. There is still, as in the sound of the Æolian harp, an echo of a past agony; but the voice of the angel preponderates.

Mazzini here has merely stated the change which took place, without attempting to assign its reason. Perhaps this silence is wise. In a universe which is of so mixed a character that optimism

and pessimism are both of them plausible views, it seems almost futile to try to determine what thought or fact it is which makes for each man the transition from despair to faith. There are plenty of phenomena to lead anybody to any conclusion.

It is enough to give her own account of the means by which this change was effected; which means she believed to be divine grace, sent in answer to prolonged and earnest prayer :—

Je crois encore à ce que les chrétiens appellent la grâce. Qu'on nomme comme on voudra les transformations qui s'opèrent en nous quand nous appelons énergiquement le principe divin de l'infini au secours de notre faiblesse; que ce bienfait s'appelle secours ou assimilation; que notre aspiration s'appelle prière ou exaltation d'esprit, il est certain que l'âme se retrempe dans les élans religieux. Je l'ai toujours éprouvé d'une manière si évidente pour moi, que j'aurais mauvaise grâce à en matérialiser l'expression sous ma plume. Prier comme certains dévots pour demander au ciel la pluie ou le soleil, c'est-à-dire des pommes de terre et des écus, pour conjurer la grêle ou la foudre, la maladie ou la mort, c'est de l'idolâtrie pure; mais lui demander le courage, la sagesse, l'amour, c'est ne pas intervertir l'ordre de ses lois immuables, c'est puiser à un foyer qui ne nous attirerait pas sans cesse si, par sa nature, il n'était pas capable de nous réchauffer.

Through whatever agency, the change took place. For the rest of her long life George Sand was, not strictly a Christian, but one of those who must be ranged along with Christians in any reckoning of the spiritual forces of the world. For we know that the true controversy is no longer between those within and those without the walls of any given church, but on a wider scale and involving profounder issues. It is a controversy between Spiritualism and Materialism, between those who base their life upon God and immortality, and those who deny or are indifferent to both. And the spiritual cause has the more need of champions now that a distinct moral superiority can no longer be claimed on either side. Perhaps the loftiest and most impressive strain of ethical teaching which is to be heard in England now, comes from one who invokes no celestial assistance, and offers to virtue no ultimate recompense of reward. The Stoics are again among us; the stern disinterestedness of their counsels of perfection is enchaining some of our noblest souls. But the moral elevation of any portion of mankind tends to the elevation of all. And although to those who rest tranquil in their belief in immortality this stoical view will appear extreme, one-sided, hopeless, impossible to man, it will yet teach them no longer to speak as if virtue were to be repaid with pleasures which it needs no virtue to enjoy. They will rather claim that a spirit of ceaseless aspiration shall be satisfied with a ceaseless progress; that virtue shall be rewarded by her own continuance, the wages of going on, and not to die.'

Few writers have dwelt on this prospect with a more sustained

and humble aspiration than George Sand. I quote one of number

less passages:—

Saintes promesses des cieux où l'on se retrouve et où l'on se reconnaît, vous n'êtes pas un vain rêve. Si nous ne devons pas aspirer à la béatitude des purs esprits du pays des chimères, si nous devons entrevoir toujours au-delà de cette vie un travail, un devoir, des épreuves et une organisation limitée dans ses facultés vis-à-vis de l'infini, du moins il nous est permis par la raison, et il nous est commandé par le cœur de compter sur une suite d'existences progressives en raison de nos bons désirs. Les saints de toutes les religions qui nous crient du fond de l'antiquité de nous dégager de la matière pour nous élever dans la hiérarchie céleste des esprits ne nous ont pas trompés quant au fond de la croyance admissible à la raison moderne. Nous pensons aujourd'hui que, si nous sommes immortels, c'est à la condition de revêtir sans cesse des organes nouveaux pour compléter notre être, qui n'a probablement pas le droit de devenir un pur esprit; mais nous pouvons regarder cette terre comme un lieu de passage et compter sur un réveil plus doux dans le berceau qui nous attend ailleurs. De mondes en mondes, nous pouvons, en nous dégageant de l'animalité qui combat ici-bas notre spiritualisme, nous rendre propres à revêtir un corps plus pur, plus approprié aux besoins de l'âme, moins combattu et moins entravé par les infirmités de la vie humaine telle que nous la subissons ici-bas.

With some such thoughts as these we should close our contemplation of the earthly career of a strong, a militant, an eager soul. To one who traces the victories of such a soul, in this dimness of her captivity, that which she hath done will seem but earnest of the things that she shall do ;' we imagine her delivered from the bewildering senses, the importunate passions of the flesh, no longer 'tormented,' but satisfied, with the things of God; glad in those spiritual kinships and that inward calm towards which her continual longing has been her continual voice.'

VOL. I.-No. 2.

R

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS.

THE RADIOMETER AND ITS LESSONS.

SOMEWHAT less than two years ago, the large assemblage of scientific men gathered at the soirée of the Royal Society was startled at the sight of a phenomenon which was altogether new and strange to the great majority of them. In the interior of a thin glass globe, about the size of a small orange, prolonged below into a cylindrical stem by which it was supported on a stand, Mr. Crookes presented to our view a horizontal cross of four slender arms radiating at right angles from a common centre; the extremity of each arm carried a thin disc about the size of a threepenny piece, black on one side and white on the other, the black sides all facing alike; while beneath the centre was a pointed steel pivot, resting on a cup that formed the summit of a rod fixed into the cylindrical stem,' on which the cross with its terminal discs was free to revolve horizontally-exactly after the fashion (in miniature) of Dr. Robinson's cup-anemometer for recording the velocity of wind. The globe, Mr. Crookes informed us, had been exhausted of air to the utmost degree attainable by the Sprengel pump ' as improved by himself, and had been then hermetically sealed. Without any other perceptible agency than the general light of the apartment, the cross slowly rotated horizontally in the direction of the white sides of the discs. When a candle was brought within a foot or so of the globe, the rotation became much quicker. When the candle was approximated to within two or three inches of the globe, the cross spun rapidly round. And when a piece of magnesium wire was burned close to it, the rapidity of the rotation became so great that the discs could no longer be separately distinguished!

6

The effect was not perceptibly diminished by the interposition, between the globe and the candle or other source of light, of a glass trough containing a solution of alum, which, while transparent to light, stops a large part of the radiant heat which accompanies it. And what was yet more remarkable—if, while the cross was rotating rapidly under the influence of a candle within a short distance, the

In the Radiometer as now constructed, the arms radiate from an inverted cup, which rests upon the pointed pivot-an arrangement that is in many respects more convenient.