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Rh they are admirable for the manner of the telling, and the world of letters would be distinctly poorer for their loss. Eugénie de Guérin's journal is charming, but its merits are of a different order. No finer, truer picture than hers has ever been given us of that strange, simple, patriarchal life which we can so little understand, a life full of delicate thinking and homely household duties. At Le Cayla, the lonely Languedoc château, where "one could pass days without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without hearing any living thing but the birds," the young Frenchwoman found in her diary companionship and mental stimulus, a link to bind her day by day to her absent brother for whom she wrote, and a weapon with which to fight the unconquerable disquiet of her heart. Her finely balanced nature, which resisted sorrow and ennui to the end, forced her to adopt that precision of phrase which is the triumph of French prose. There is a tender grace in her descriptions, a restraint in her sweet, sudden confidences, a wistfulness in her joy, and always a nobility of thought which makes even her gentleness seem austere.