as the expiation of same sin.  Meanwhile, O my Gad, I leave this
matter in Thy hands, as I leave my life and my soul."

On the 20th of April he wrote:--
"The little horse is well; God has helped me."

German manners and customs are so different from ours, and contrasts
occur so frequently in the same man, on the other side of the Rhine,
that anything less than all the quotations which we have given would
have been insufficient to place before our readers a true idea of
that character made up of artlessness and reason, childishness and
strength, depression and enthusiasm, material details and poetic
ideas, which renders Sand a man incomprehensible to us.  We will now
continue the portrait, which still wants a few finishing touches.

When he returned to Erlangen, after the completion of his "cure,"
Sand read Faust far the first time.  At first he was amazed at that
work, which seemed to him an orgy of genius; then, when he had
entirely finished it, he reconsidered his first impression, and
wrote:--

"4th May

"Oh, horrible struggle of man and devil!  What Mephistopheles is in
me I feel far the first time in this hour, and I feel it, O God, with
consternation!

"About eleven at night I finished reading the tragedy, and I felt and
saw the fiend in myself, so that by midnight, amid my tears and
despair, I was at last frightened at myself."

Sand was falling by degrees into a deep melancholy, from which
nothing could rouse him except his desire to purify and preach
morality to the students around him.  To anyone who knows university
life such a task will seem superhuman.  Sand, however, was not
discouraged, and if he could not gain an influence over everyone, he
at least succeeded in forming around him a considerable circle of the
most intelligent and the best; nevertheless, in the midst of these
apostolic labours strange longings for death would overcome him; he
seemed to recall heaven and want to return to it; he called these
temptations "homesickness for the soul's country."

His favourite authors were Lessing, Schiller, Herder, and Goethe;
after re-reading the two last for the twentieth time, this is what he
wrote:

"Good and evil touch each other; the woes of the young Werther and
Weisslingen's seduction, are almost the same story; no matter, we
must not judge between what is good and what is evil in others; for
that is what God will do.  I have just been spending much time over
this thought, and have become convinced that in no circumstances
ought we to allow ourselves to seek for the devil in others, and that
we have no right to judge; the only creature over wham we have
received the power to judge and condemn is ourself, and that gives us
enough constant care, business, and trouble.

"I have again to-day felt a profound desire to quit this world and
enter a higher world; but this desire is rather dejection than
strength, a lassitude than an upsoaring."

The year 1816 was spent by Sand in these pious attempts upon his
young comrades, in this ceaseless self-examination, and in the
perpetual battle which he waged with the desire for death that
pursued him; every day he had deeper doubts of himself; and on the
1st of January, 1817, he wrote this prayer in his diary :--

"Grant to me, O Lord, to me whom Thou halt endowed, in sending me on
earth, with free will, the grace that in this year which we are now
beginning I may never relax this constant attention, and not
shamefully give up the examination of my conscience which I have
hitherto made.  Give me strength to increase the attention which I
turn upon my own life, and to diminish that which I turn upon the
life of others; strengthen my will that it may become powerful to
command the desires of the body and the waverings of the soul; give
me a pious conscience entirely devoted to Thy celestial kingdom, that
I may always belong to Thee, or after failing, may be able to return
to Thee."

Sand was right in praying to God for the year 1817, and his fears
were a presentiment: the skies of Germany, lightened by Leipzig and
Waterloo, were once more darkened; to the colossal and universal
despotism of Napoleon succeeded the individual oppression of those
little princes who made up the Germanic Diet, and all that the
nations had gained by overthrowing the giant was to be governed by
dwarfs.  This was the time when secret societies were organised
throughout Germany; let us say a few words about them, for the
history that we are writing is not only that of individuals, but also
that of nations, and every time that occasion presents itself we will
give our little picture a wide horizon.

The secret societies of Germany, of which, without knowing them, we
have all heard, seem, when we follow them up, like rivers, to
originate in some sort of affiliation to those famous clubs of the
'i1lumines' and the freemasons which made so much stir in France at
the close of the eighteenth century.  At the time of the revolution
of '89 these different philosophical, political, and religious sects
enthusiastically accepted the republican doctrines, and the successes
of our first generals have often been attributed to the secret
efforts of the members.  When Bonaparte, who was acquainted with
these groups, and was even said to have belonged to them, exchanged
his general's uniform for an emperor's cloak, all of them,
considering him as a renegade and traitor, not only rose against him
at home, but tried to raise enemies against him abroad; as they
addressed themselves to noble and generous passions, they found a
response, and princes to whom their results might be profitable
seemed for a moment to encourage them.  Among others, Prince Louis of
Prussia was grandmaster of one of these societies.

The attempted murder by Stops, to which we have already referred, was
one of the thunderclaps of the storm; but its morrow brought the
peace of Vienna, and the degradation of Austria was the death-blow of
the old Germanic organisation.  These societies, which had received a
mortal wound in 1806 and were now controlled by the French police,
instead of continuing to meet in public, were forced to seek new
members in the dark.  In 1811 several agents of these societies were
arrested in Berlin, but the Prussian authorities, following secret
orders of (Queen Louisa, actually protected them, so that they were
easily able to deceive the French police about their intentions.
About February 1815 the disasters of the French army revived the
courage of these societies, for it was seen that God was helping
their cause: the students in particular joined enthusiastically in
the new attempts that were now begun; many colleges enrolled
themselves almost entire, anal chose their principals and professors
as captains; the poet, Korner, killed on the 18th of October at
Liegzig, was the hero of this campaign.

The triumph of this national movement, which twice carried the
Prussian army--largely composed of volunteers--to Paris, was
followed, when the treaties of 1815 and the new Germanic constitution
were made known, by a terrible reaction in Germany.  All these young
men who, exiled by their princes, had risen in the name of liberty,
soon perceived that they had been used as tools to establish European
despotism; they wished to claim the promises that had been made, but
the policy of Talleyrand and Metternich weighed on them, and
repressing them at the first words they uttered, compelled them to
shelter their discontent and their hopes in the universities, which,
enjoying a kind of constitution of their own, more easily escaped the
investigations made by the spies of the Holy Alliance; but, repressed
as they were, these societies continued nevertheless to exist, and
kept up communications by means of travelling students, who, bearing
verbal messages, traversed Germany under the pretence of botanising,
and, passing from mountain to mountain, sowed broadcast those
luminous and hopeful words of which peoples are always greedy and
kings always fear.

We have seen that Sand, carried away by the general movement, had
gone through the campaign of 1815 as a volunteer, although he was
then only nineteen years old.  On his return, he, like others, had
found his golden hopes deceived, and it is from this period that we
find his journal assuming the tone of mysticism and sadness which our
readers must have remarked in it.  He soon entered one of these
associations, the Teutonia; and from that moment, regarding the great
cause which he had taken up as a religious one, he attempted to make
the conspirators worthy of their enterprise, and thus arose his
attempts to inculcate moral doctrines, in which he succeeded with
some, but failed with the majority.  Sand had succeeded, however, in
forming around him a certain circle of Puritans, composed of about
sixty to eighty students, all belonging to the group of the
'Burschenschaft' which continued its political and religious course
despite all the jeers of the opposing group--the 'Landmannschaft'.
One of his friends called Dittmar and he were pretty much the chiefs,
and although no election had given them their authority, they
exercised so much influence upon what was decided that in any
particular case their fellow-adepts were sure spontaneously to obey
any impulse that they might choose to impart.  The meetings of the
Burschen took place upon a little hill crowned by a ruined castle,
which was situated at some distance from Erlangen, and which Sand and
Dittmar had called the Ruttli, in memory of the spot where Walter
Furst, Melchthal, and Stauffacher had made their vow to deliver their
country; there, under the pretence of students' games, while they
built up a new house with the ruined fragments, they passed
alternately from symbol to action and from action to symbol.

Meanwhile the association was making such advances throughout Germany
that not only the princes and kings of the German confederation, but
also the great European powers, began to be uneasy.  France sent
agents to bring home reports, Russia paid agents on the spot, and the
persecutions that touched a professor and exasperated a whole

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