March 16, 1833

I am reading some remarkable thoughts in L’Europe littéraire. It says that intellectual zones are fading day by day, that the higher minds scattered throughout the globe are beginning to understand one another, that everything is moving toward a vast republic of human thought. And farther on: that the ancients admirably grasped the general features of the human soul and of nature, making of them an outward poetry, plastic, visible; but that the age of inward, profound, analytical poetry has come... These thoughts are not altogether new and have been circulating in the world for some time; but it is good to keep the great movement taking place as present to one’s mind as possible, to give it expression.

March 19, 1833

A walk in the forest of Coëtquen. Came upon a place rather remarkable for its wildness: the path descends abruptly into a little ravine where a small stream flows over a bed of slate, which gives its waters a blackish color, unpleasant at first, but no longer so once one has observed its harmony with the black trunks of the old oaks, the dark greenery of the ivy, and its contrast with the birches’ smooth white legs. A great wind [from the] north rolled over the forest and made it bellow deeply. The trees struggled beneath the gusts like mad creatures. Through the branches we saw clouds flying swiftly in strange black masses, seeming to brush the treetops. This great, dark, floating veil sometimes opened in gaps through which a ray of sunlight slipped, descending like a flash of lightning into the forest’s breast. These sudden passages of light gave those depths, so majestic in shadow, something wild-eyed and strange, like a laugh upon a dead man’s lips.

March 20, 1833

Winter departs smiling; it bids us farewell with a beautiful sun shining in a sky as clear and smooth as a Venetian mirror. Another step of time draws to its close. Oh, why can it not, like the coursers of the immortals, reach the limits of its allotted span in four bounds!

Finished the first volume of the History of the Italian Republics. It is a beautiful spectacle to see liberty emerging from the ruins of the Roman Empire and taking her seat, a cross in her hand, upon the shores of the sea, at Venice, Genoa, Pisa. She first appeared at Amalfi, Naples, Gaeta; but the kings drove her away. Then she bade a long farewell to southern Italy and, always following the coast, came to rest in the north. M. Sismonde Sismondi has missed this beautiful drama of Italian liberty; he has not understood the character of its highest personage, the true hero of this great scene, the Pope. He casts almost among the extras the actors to whom the leading role belongs. He portrays the sovereign pontiffs as vulgar men of ambition, quarrelsome barons, with tiaras on their heads and croziers in their hands. In his work this leaves an immense void, felt on every page. — He also pays Countess Matilda very poorly for her noble devotion to the cause of the popes, and consequently to Italian liberty.

March 21, 1833

Pleasure exhausted. I have read the last page of Studies of Nature. It is one of those books one wishes would never end. There is little to gain for science, but much for poetry, for the elevation of the soul and the contemplation of nature. This book frees and illuminates a sense we all possess, though veiled, vague, and almost deprived of activity: the sense which gathers physical beauties and delivers them to the soul, which spiritualizes them, harmonizes them, combines them with ideal beauties, and thus enlarges its sphere of love and adoration.

My God, why do we complain of our isolation? I was long possessed by that madness. It was because I was living wrongly then; I had established false relations between created beings and my soul, and I suffered greatly, for creation denied me its treasures of delight and shut me out of its intimacy because of those false relations. I lamented in a profound solitude; the earth seemed worse to me than a desert island, wholly bare, in the midst of a wild ocean. It was a silence to inspire terror. Madness, pure madness! There is no isolation for anyone who knows how to take his place within the universal harmony and open his soul to all the impressions of that harmony. Then one comes almost to feel physically that one lives from God and in God: the soul drinks, breathlessly, of that universal life; it swims there like a fish in water.

Let us renounce the worship of idols, turn our backs on all the gods of art, laden with rouge and false ornaments, on all those images that have mouths and do not speak. Let us adore nature, frank, innocent, and in no way exclusive. My God, can one devise poetics in the face of the universe’s ample poetry? The Lord has made your poetics for you! It is creation. Do you presume to know more than he does?

March 22, 1833

A barren day; the letter that reached me last night has completely paralyzed me. It is a little severe, but full of good advice. Unfortunately, I am so constituted that the best remedies fail to work upon me and, stranger still, sometimes worsen my condition. Thus this letter, touching my most sensitive wounds to heal them, awakened within me a vibration of all my past sufferings. All my bitter memories started awake; in a few hours I summed up ten years’ miseries, summed them up not in thought but in real and profound sensation. As long as these sad things remain imprinted on my memory, my new life will be poor and dragging. The slightest thing sends me back into those memories and provokes crises which exhaust me and leave me utterly spent. It is true that the past of which I speak is still so close that it casts the whole length of its shadow upon me. I hope that, as I draw farther from it, its present power will weaken, and I shall at last find myself free of its impressions. Nevertheless, I persist in believing that there is within me such an organic flaw and such disrepair that I shall never wholly restore myself. My fearful, anxious, analytical element is too vigorous ever to leave me in peace. Perhaps, through much love of God, I shall manage to take away a little of its strength. If I alone suffered from it, so be it; but those I love, who are good enough to love me, suffer from it too. I grieve them, and that is my greatest misfortune.

I advance very slowly in matters of the mind. I have an intimation of a thousand things, but it is more a torment than an advance. I read slowly, never free of anxious preoccupations; even the contemplation of enchanting nature cannot lull those thoughts which buzz ceaselessly around my soul like mosquitoes. I drag myself through the study of languages, for which I am nevertheless eager. I am slow in everything, yet I feel something spurring me sharply on.

March 24, 1833

E... came to me deeply moved, with tears in his eyes. — What is the matter? — M. Féli frightened me. — How? — He was sitting behind the chapel, beneath the two Scots pines; he took his stick, drew a grave upon the turf, and said to me: ‘That is where I wish to rest; but no tombstone, a simple bench of turf. Oh, how comfortable I shall be there!’ I thought he felt ill, that he foresaw his approaching end. Besides, this is not the first time he has been troubled by presentiments; when leaving for Rome he said to us: ‘I do not expect to see you again; do the good I have been unable to do.’ He is impatient to die. This world is so miserable for any Christian soul, and especially for a Christian soul such as his!

March 26, 1833

A young man from Dauphiné named Henri Guillermard sends me verses about a few stanzas on Poland, published in L’Avenir eighteen months ago. It is a rather amusing adventure to find one’s vanity stirred again after so long, and for so little.

March 27, 1833

I am making fairly good progress along my new path. I do sometimes feel weariness; but God quickly restores my courage, no doubt because I have placed more trust in his infinite goodness. My work is becoming surer and calmer; knowledge enters my head without confusion or crowding, peacefully and in fine order.

I find great delight in combining and mingling the study of ancient and modern art. These two studies, joined and holding hands, lend each other wonderful charms. It reminds me of an engraving in which Homer is seen entrusting his hand to a beautiful child who leads him.

March 28, 1833

Whenever we let nature penetrate us, our soul opens to the most moving impressions. There is something in nature, whether she laughs and adorns herself in fine weather, or grows pale, gray, cold, and rainy in autumn and winter, that stirs not only the soul’s surface but even its innermost secrets, awakening a thousand memories which apparently have no connection with the outward scene, but which surely maintain a correspondence with nature’s soul through sympathies unknown to us. I felt that astonishing power today while breathing the warm spring air, lying in a wood of beeches.

March 29, 1833

Yesterday we took our walk farther than usual. M. Gerbet, Mermet, and I ventured on a reconnaissance to the north, as far as the height of Saint-Hélen. It is a kind of belvedere from which the view extends over a vast horizon, dark and monotonous to the south and east. To the north rise the shores of the Ocean, tracing a long, straight, blue line. A little to the northeast, through a break in the heights, we glimpsed the Bay of Cancale. Struck by the sun, the waters shone brightly, tracing a luminous bar that let us distinguish them from the bluish coast of Normandy. To the west we saw Dinan down there, with its tall spires, half veiled in the vapors that hover above towns in the distant plains. In the same direction, white country houses stood out against a dark background, invariably accompanied by a clump of firs appearing like an enormous black giant standing sentinel to guard the hearth. All around the horizon, pointed church towers rose at intervals, like the towers of that immense rampart. I am enchanted by this excursion for having opened that great panorama to me, but above all for having let me glimpse the Ocean.

March 30, 1833

Oh, what a beautiful spectacle to carry thought away, that immense circulation of life taking place within nature’s ample breast; that life which wells from an invisible fountain and swells the veins of this universe. Obeying its upward movement, it rises from kingdom to kingdom, forever purifying and ennobling itself, until at last it makes the human heart beat, the center toward which its thousand currents converge from every side. There it is brought into contact with the Divinity; there, as upon the altar where incense burns, it evaporates, through an ineffable sacrifice, into the bosom of God. It seems to me that there would be profound and wonderful things to say about nature’s sacrifice in the human heart and the eucharistic immolation in that same heart. The simultaneity of these two sacrifices, and the absorption of one into the other upon the same altar, this meeting of God and all creation within humanity, would, it seems to me, open great vistas in height and depth. Sublimitas et profundum.