"He was," says Balzac, "a soul enslaved." So was Raphael de Valentine, we say. How, then, is Louis an advance upon the other? Raphael was the willing slave of desire; Louis, the soul longing for freedom. "Where gifts are equal, says the author, "the feelings based upon the simpler and truer desires, truer becomes purer, must surpass the lamentations of genius."

"Happily for me," says Louis, "there come joyful moments when the walls of the class-room disappear and I am away -- in the meadows. What delight to float upon thought as a bird upon its wing!"

At this point also belongs the use of thought instead of being used by it. Raphael was enslaved by his thought, Louis was liberated by his; and he was freed sufficiently from the bondage of his environment to find and trace toward their source the eternal things which stand immovable in all the confusion and destruction of sense actualities.

How forcibly is illustrated in his school-life the limitations of artificial standards and methods of education, that curb and confine the natural intuition that would reveal far more than can ever be learned from books; the false value placed upon books, and upon memorizing their contents"

We see at this stage of Louis' career the creative power of thought and the susceptibility of the soul to the ideas from by thinking, together with their possible expression in the body. "If," says Louis,