December 19 (in a billet).

A sweet day, ending here round the table.  Quiet, drawing, music.  I can think with calm of the length of the days to come when I realise how swift have been these days that are past.  Half the month is gone, and Christmas comes in the midst of war.  The only thing for me is to adapt myself entirely to these conditions of existence, and, owing to my union with you, to gain a degree of acceptance which is of an order higher than human courage.

December 21, morning.

MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,—­I have told you freely in my letters of my happiness; but the rock ahead of happiness is that poor humanity is in perpetual fear of losing it.  In spite of all experience, we do not realise that in the eternal scheme of things a new happiness always grows at the side of an old one.

For myself, I have not to look for a new one.  I have only to try to reconcile two wisdoms.  One, which is human, prompts me to cultivate my happiness, but the other teaches me that human happiness is a most perishable flower.

We may say:  Let us make use of the joys chosen by an upright conscience; but let us never forget how swiftly these pass.

Yes, the Holy Scriptures contain the finest and most poetical philosophy.  I think they owe it to their affiliation to the oldest philosophies.  There are many disputable things in Edouard Schure, but what remains is the divination which made him climb through all doctrine to the infinitely distant Source of human wisdom.

Do you know that those touching traditions of the Good Shepherd and the Divine Mother, so happily employed in our Christian religions, are the creations of the oldest symbolism?  The Greeks derived them from their own spiritual ancestors; with them the good shepherd was called Hermes, the god of the migration of souls.  In the same way, the type of our Madonna is the great Demeter, the mother who bears an infant in her arms.

One feels that all religions, as they succeeded each other, transmitted the same body of symbols, renewed each time by humanity’s perpetually-young spirit of poetry.

December 23 (in the dark).

I had begun this letter yesterday, when I was forced to leave off.  It was then splendid weather, which has lasted fairly well.  But we are now back again in our first lines.  This time we are occupying the village itself, our pretty Corot village of two months ago.  But our outpost is situated in a house where we are obliged to show no sign of life, so as to conceal our presence from the enemy.  And so here we are at nine o’clock in the morning, in a darkness that would make it seem to be late on Christmas eve.

Your dear letter lately received has given me great joy.  It is true that Grace and Inspiration are two names for the same thing.