In the spring of 1616 the greatest Englishman of all time passed away
with no public homage or notice, and the first tributes paid to his
memory were prefixed to the miserably garbled and inaccurate edition of
his works which was issued seven years later by a brace of players under
the patronage of a brace of peers. In the spring of 1885 the greatest
Frenchman of all time has passed away amid such universal anguish and
passion of regret as never before accompanied the death of the greatest
among poets. The contrast is of course not wholly due to the
incalculable progress of humanity during the two hundred and sixty-nine
years which divide the date of our mourning from the date of
Shakespeare's death: nor even to the vast superiority of Frenchmen to
Englishmen in the quality of generous, just, and reasonable gratitude
for the very highest of all benefits that man can confer on mankind. For
the greatest poet of this century has been more than such a force of
indirect and gradual beneficence as every great writer must needs be.
His spiritual service has been in its inmost essence, in its highest
development, the service of a healer and a comforter, the work of a
redeemer and a prophet. Above all other apostles who have brought us
each the glad tidings of his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of his
special inspiration, has this one deserved to be called by the most
beautiful and tender of all human titles--the son of consolation. His
burning wrath and scorn unquenchable were fed with light and heat from
the inexhaustible dayspring of his love--a fountain of everlasting and
unconsuming fire. We know of no such great poet so good, of no such good
man so great in genius: not though Milton and Shelley, our greatest
lyric singer and our single epic poet, remain with us for signs and
examples of devotion as heroic and self-sacrifice as pure. And therefore
it is but simply reasonable that not those alone should mourn for him
who have been reared and nurtured on the fruits of his creative spirit:
that those also whom he wrought and fought for, but who know him only as
their champion and their friend--they that cannot even read him, but
remember how he labored in their cause, that their children might fare
otherwise than they--should bear no unequal part in the burden of this
infinite and worldwide sorrow.
For us, who from childhood upwards have fostered and fortified whatever
of good was born in us--all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of
human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, all passions and
aspirations found loyal to the service of duty and of love--with the
bread of his deathless word and the wine of his immortal song, the one
thing possible to do in this first hour of bitterness and stupefaction
at the sense of a loss not possible yet to realize, is not to declaim
his praise or parade our lamentation in modulated effects or efforts of
panegyric or of dirge: it is to reckon up once more the standing account
of our all but incalculable debt. A brief and simple summary of his
published works may probably lay before the student some points and some
details not generally familiar to the run of English readers: and I know
not what better service might be done them than to bring into their
sight such aspects of the most multiform and many-sided genius that ever
wrought in prose or verse as are least obvious and least notorious to
the foreign world of letters.
Poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, and patriot, the
spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century was before all things and
above all things a poet. Throughout all the various and ambitious
attempts of his marvelous boyhood--criticism, drama, satire, elegy,
epigram, and romance--the dominant vein is poetic. His example will
stand forever as the crowning disproof of the doubtless more than
plausible opinion that the most amazing precocity of power is a sign of
ensuing impotence and premature decay. There was never a more brilliant
boy than Victor Hugo; but there has never been a greater man. At any
other than a time of mourning it might be neither unseasonable nor
unprofitable to observe that the boy's early verse, moulded on the
models of the eighteenth century, is an arsenal of satire on
revolutionary principles or notions which might suffice to furnish forth
with more than their natural equipment of epigram a whole army of
reactionary rhymesters and pamphleteers. But from the first, without
knowing it, he was on the road to Damascus: if not to be struck down by
sudden miracle, yet by no less inevitable a process to undergo a no less
unquestionable conversion. At sixteen he wrote for a wager in the space
of a fortnight the chivalrous and heroic story of _Bug-Jargal_;
afterwards recast and reinformed with fresh vigor of vitality, when the
author had attained the maturer age of twenty-three. His tenderness and
manliness of spirit were here made nobly manifest: his originality and
ardor of imagination, wild as yet and crude and violent, found vent two
years later in _Han d'Islande._ But no boyish work on record ever showed
more singular force of hand, more brilliant variety of power: though the
author's criticism ten years later admits that "il n'y a dans _Han
d'Islande_ qu'une chose sentie, l'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose
observée, l'amour de la jeune fille." But as the work of a boy's fancy
or invention, touched here and there with genuine humor, terror, and
pathos, it is not less wonderful than are the author's first odes for
ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and
sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish
stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the
lap of war and cradled in traditions of daring, is evident whenever an
episode of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic,
excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it is in the ballads written
between his twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo
first showed himself, beyond all question and above all cavil, an
original and a great poet. _La Chasse du Burgrave_ and _Le Pas d'Armes
du Roi Jean_ would suffice of themselves to establish that. The fire,
the music, the force, the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious
little poems must needs, one would think, impress even such readers as
might be impervious to the charm of their exquisitely vigorous and
dexterous execution. Take for example this one stanza from the ballad
last mentioned:--
La cohue,
Flot de fer,
Frappe, hue,
Remplit l'air,
Et, profonde,
Tourne et gronde
Comme une onde
Sur la mer.
It will of course, I should hope, be understood once for all that when I
venture to select for special mention any special poem of Hugo's I do
not dream of venturing to suggest that others are not or may not be
fully as worthy of homage, or that anything of this incomparable
master's work will not requite our study or does not demand our
admiration; I do but take leave to indicate in passing some of those
which have been to me especially fruitful of enduring delight, and still
are cherished in consequence with a peculiar gratitude.
At twenty-five the already celebrated lyric poet published his
magnificent historic drama of _Cromwell_: a work sufficient of itself to
establish the author's fame for all ages in which poetry and thought,
passion and humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfection of
structure, facile force of dialogue and splendid eloquence of style,
continue to be admired and enjoyed. That the author has apparently
confounded one earl of Rochester with another more famous bearer of the
same title must not be allowed to interfere with the credit due to him
for wide and various research. Any dullard can point the finger at a
slip here and there in the history, a change or an error of detail or of
date: it needs more care to appreciate the painstaking and ardent
industry which has collected and fused-together a great mass of historic
and legendary material, the fervent energy of inspiration which has
given life, order, and harmony to the vast and versatile design. As to
the executive part of the poem, the least that can be said by any
competent judge of that matter is that Molière was already equalled and
Corneille was already excelled in their respective provinces of verse by
the young conqueror whose rule was equal and imperial over every realm
of song. The comic interludes or episodes of the second and third acts,
so admirably welded into the structure or woven into the thread of the
action, would suffice to prove this when collated with the seventeenth
scene of the third act and the great speech of Cromwell in the fifth.
Arrêtez!
Que veut dire ceci? Pourquoi cette couronne?
Que veut-on que j'en fasse? et qui donc me la donne?
Est-ce un rêve? Est-ce bien le bandeau que je vois?
De quel droit me vient-on confondre avec les rois?
Qui mêle un tel scandale à nos pieuses fêtes
Quoi! leur couronne, à moi qui fais tomber leurs têtes?
S'est-on mépris au but de ces solennités?--
Milords, messieurs, anglais, frères, qui m'écoutez,
Je ne viens point ici ceindre le diadème,
Mais retremper mon titre au sein du peuple même,
Rajeunir mon pouvoir, renouveler mes droits.
L'écarlate sacrée était teinte deux fois.
Cette pourpre est au peuple, et, d'une âme loyale,
Je la tiens de lui.--Mais la couronne royale!
Quand l'ai-je demandée? Et qui dit que j'en veux?
Je ne donnerais pas un seul de mes cheveux,
De ces cheveux blanchis à servir l'Angleterre,
Pour tous les fleurons d'or des princes de la terre.
Ôtez cela d'ici! Remportez, remportez
Ce hochet, ridicule entre les vanités!
N'attendez pas qu'aux pieds je foule ces misères!
Qu'ils me connaissent mal, les hommes peu sincères
Qui m'osent affronter jusqu'à me couronner!
J'ai reçu de Dieu plus qu'ils ne peuvent donner,
La grâce inamissible; et de moi je suis maître.
Une fois fils du ciel, peut-on cesser de l'être?
De nos prospérités l'univers est jaloux.
Que me faut-il de plus que le bonheur de tous?
Je vous l'ai dit. Ce peuple est le peuple d'élite.
L'Europe de cette île est l'humble satellite.
Tout cède à notre étoile; et l'impie est maudit.
Il semble, à voir cela, que le Seigneur ait dit:
--Angleterre! grandis, et sois ma fille aînée.
Entre les nations mes mains t'ont couronnée;
Sois donc ma bien-aimée, et marche à mes côtés.--
Il déroule sur nous d'abondantes bontés;
Chaque jour qui finit, chaque jour qui commence,
Ajoute un anneau d'or à cette chaîne immense.
On croirait que ce Dieu, terrible aux philistins,
À comme un ouvrier composé nos destins;
Que son bras, sur un axe indestructible aux âges,
De ce vaste édifice a scellé les rouages,
Œuvre mystérieuse, et dont ses longs efforts
Pour des siècles peut-être ont monté les ressorts.
Ainsi tout va. La roue, à la roue enchaînée,
Mord de sa dent de fer la machine entraînée;
Les massifs balanciers, les antennes, les poids,
Labyrinthe vivant, se meuvent à la fois;
L'effrayante machine accomplit sans relâche
Sa marche inexorable et sa puissante tâche;
Et des peuples entiers, pris dans ses mille bras,
Disparaîtraient broyés, s'ils ne se rangeaient pas.
Et j'entraverais Dieu, dont la loi salutaire
Nous fait un sort à part dans le sort de la terre!
J'irais, du peuple élu foulant le droit ancien,
Mettre mon intérêt à la place du sien!
Pilote, j'ouvrirais la voile aux vents contraires!
(_Hochant la tête._)
Non, je ne donne pas cette joie aux faux frères.
Le vieux navire anglais est toujours roi des flots.
Le colosse est debout. Que sont d'obscurs complots
Contre les hauts destins de la Grande-Bretagne?
Qu'est-ce qu'un coup de pioche aux flancs d'une
montagne?
(_Promenant des yeux de lynx autour de lui._)
Avis aux malveillants! on sait tout ce qu'ils font.
Le flot est transparent, si l'abîme est profond.
On voit le fond du piège où rampe leur pensée.
La vipère parfois de son dard s'est blessée;
Au feu qu'on allumait souvent on se brûla;
Et les yeux du Seigneur vont courant çà et là.--
Qui du peuple et des rois a signé le divorce?
Moi.--Croit-on donc me prendre à cette vaine amorce?
Un diadème!--Anglais, j'en brisais autrefois.
Sans en avoir porté, j'en connais bien le poids.
Quitter pour une cour le camp qui m'environne?
Changer mon glaive en sceptre et mon casque en
couronne?
Allons! suis-je un enfant? me croit-on né d'hier?
Ne sais-je pas que l'or pèse plus que le fer?
M'édifier un trône! Eh! c'est creuser ma tombe.
Cromwell, pour y monter, sait trop comme on en tombe.
Et d'ailleurs, que d'ennuis s'amassent sur ces fronts
Qui se rident sitôt, hérissés de fleurons!
Chacun de ces fleurons cache une ardente épine.
La couronne les tue; un noir souci les mine;
Elle change en tyran le mortel le plus doux,
Et, pesant sur le roi, le fait peser sur tous.
Le peuple les admire, et, s'abdiquant lui-même,
Compte tous les rubis dont luit le diadème;
Mais comme il frémirait pour eux de leur fardeau,
S'il regardait le front et non pas le bandeau!
Eux, leur charge les trouble, et leurs mains souveraines
De l'état chancelant mêlent bientôt les rênes.--
Ah! remportez ce signe exécrable, odieux!
Ce bandeau trop souvent tombe du front aux yeux.--
(_Larmoyant._)
Et qu'en ferais-je enfin? Mal né pour la puissance,
Je suis simple de cœur et vis dans l'innocence.
Si j'ai, la fronde en main, veillé sur le bercail,
Si j'ai devant l'écueil pris place au gouvernail,
J'ai dû me dévouer pour la cause commune.
Mais que n'ai-je vieilli dans mon humble fortune!
Que n'ai-je vu tomber les tyrans aux abois,
À l'ombre de mon chaume et de mon petit bois!
Hélas! j'eusse aimé mieux ces champs où l'on respire,
Le ciel m'en est témoin, que les soins de l'empire;
Et Cromwell eût trouvé plus de charme cent fois
À garder ses moutons qu'à détrôner des rois!
(_Pleurant._)
Que parle-t-on de sceptre? Ah! j'ai manqué ma vie.
Ce morceau de clinquant n'a rien qui me convie.
Ayez pitié de moi, frères, loin d'envier
Votre vieux général, votre vieil Olivier.
Je sens mon bras faiblir, et ma fin est prochaine.
Depuis assez longtemps suis-je pas à la chaîne?
Je suis vieux, je suis las; je demande merci.
N'est-il pas temps qu'enfin je me repose aussi?
Chaque jour j'en appelle à la bonté divine.
Et devant le Seigneur je frappe ma poitrine.
Que je veuille être roi! Si frêle et tant d'orgueil!
Ce projet, et j'en jure à côté du cercueil,
Il m'est plus étranger, frères, que la lumière
Du soleil à l'enfant dans le sein de sa mère!
Loin ce nouveau pouvoir à mes vœux présenté!
Je n'en accepte rien,--rien que l'hérédité.
The subtlety and variety of power displayed in the treatment of the
chief character should be evident alike to those who look only on the
upright side of it and those who can see only its more oblique aspect.
The Cromwell of Hugo is as far from the faultless monster of Carlyle's
creation and adoration as from the all but unredeemed villain of
royalist and Hibernian tradition: he is a great and terrible poetic
figure, imbued throughout with active life and harmonized throughout by
imaginative intuition: a patriot and a tyrant, a dissembler and a
believer, a practical humorist and a national hero.
The famous preface in which the batteries of pseudo classic tradition
were stormed and shattered at a charge has itself long since become a
classic. That the greatest poet was also the greatest prose-writer of
his generation there could no longer be any doubt among men of any
intelligence: but not even yet was more than half the greatness of his
multitudinous force revealed. Two years later, at the age of
twenty-seven, he published the superb and entrancing _Orientales_: the
most musical and many-colored volume of verse that ever had glorified
the language. From _Le Feu du Ciel_ to _Sara la Baigneuse_, from the
thunder-peals of exterminating judgment to the flute-notes of innocent
girlish luxury in the sense of loveliness and life, the inexhaustible
range of his triumph expands and culminates and extends. Shelley has
left us no more exquisite and miraculous piece of lyrical craftsmanship
than _Les Djinns_; none perhaps so rich in variety of modulation, so
perfect in rise and growth and relapse and reiterance of music.
Murs, ville,
Et port,
Asile
De mort,
Mer grise
Où brise
La brise,
Tout dort.
Dans la plaine
Naît un bruit.
C'est l'haleine
De la nuit.
Elle brame
Comme une âme
Qu'une flamme
Toujours suit.
Then the terrible music of the flight of evil spirits--"troupeau lourd
et rapide"--grows as it were note by note and minute by minute up to its
full height of tempest, and again relapses and recedes into the
subsiding whisper of the corresponsive close.
Ce bruit vague
Qui s'endort,
C'est la vague
Sur le bord;
C'est la plainte
Presque éteinte
D'une sainte
Pour un mort.
On doute
La nuit...
J'écoute:--
Tout fuit,
Tout passe;
L'espace
Efface
Le bruit.
And here, like Shelley, was Hugo already the poet of freedom, a champion
of the sacred right and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a
royalist education, the crust of reactionary misconceptions, had already
begun to drop off; not yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive
and to understand the doctrine of human right, the conception of the
common weal, as distinguished from imaginary duties and opposed to
hereditary claims.
The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was illuminated by the issue
of these passionate and radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his
generous and lifelong campaign or crusade against the principle of
capital punishment. With all possible reverence and all possible
reluctance, but remembering that without perfect straightforwardness and
absolute sincerity I should be even unworthier than I am to speak of
Victor Hugo at all, I must say that his reasoning on this subject seems
to me insufficient and inconclusive: that his own radical principle, the
absolute inviolability of human life, the absolute sinfulness of
retributive blood-shedding, if not utterly illogical and untenable, is
tenable or logical only on the ground assumed by those quaintest though
not least pathetic among fanatics and heroes, the early disciples of
George Fox. If a man tells you that supernatural revelation has
forbidden him to take another man's life under all and any
circumstances, he is above or beyond refutation; if he says that
self-defense is justifiable, and that righteous warfare is a patriotic
duty, but that to exact from the very worst of murderers, a parricide or
a poisoner, a Philip the Second or a Napoleon the Third, the payment of
a life for a life--or even of one infamous existence for whole hecatombs
of innocent lives--is an offense against civilization and a sin against
humanity, I am not merely unable to accept, but incompetent to
understand his argument. We may most heartily agree with him that France
is degraded by the guillotine, and that England is disgraced by the
gallows, and yet our abhorrence of these barbarous and nauseous
brutalities may not preclude us from feeling that a dealer (for example)
in professional infanticide by starvation might very properly be
subjected to vivisection without anæsthetics, and that all manly and
womanly minds not distorted or distracted by prepossessions or
assumptions might rationally and laudably rejoice in the prospect of
this legal and equitable process. "The senseless old law of retaliation"
(_la vieille et inepte loi du talion_) is inept or senseless only when
the application of it is false to the principle: when justice in theory
becomes unjust in practice. Another stale old principle or
proverb--"abusus non tollit usum"--suffices to confute some of the
arguments--I am very far from saying, all--adduced or alleged by the
ardent eloquence of Victor Hugo in his admirable masterpiece of terrible
and pathetic invention--_Le dernier jour d'un condamné_, and
subsequently in the impressive little history of _Claude Gueux_, in the
famous speech on behalf of Charles Hugo when impeached on a charge of
insult to the laws in an article on the punishment of death, and in the
fervent eloquence of his appeal on the case of a criminal executed in
Guernsey, and of his protest addressed to Lord Palmerston against the
horrible result of its rejection. That certain surviving methods of
execution are execrable scandals to the country which maintains them, he
has proved beyond all humane or reasonable question; and that all
murderers are not alike inexcusable is no less indisputable a
proposition; but beyond these two points the most earnest and exuberant
advocacy can advance nothing likely to convince any but those already
converted to the principle that human life must never be taken in
punishment of crime--that there are not criminals whose existence
insults humanity, and cries aloud on justice for mercy's very sake to
cut it off.
The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond all others in the history
of French literature: it was the year of _Hernani_, the date of
liberation and transfiguration for the tragic stage of France. The
battle which raged round the first acted play of Hugo's, and the triumph
which crowned the struggles of its champions, are not these things
written in too many chronicles to be for the thousandth time related
here? And of its dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be
uttered that must not before this have been repeated at least some
myriads of times? But if there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of
the portraits, the majestic and august monologue of Charles the Fifth at
the tomb of Charles the Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos,
the bitter sweetness of the close, convey no sense of genius and utter
no message of delight, we can only say that it would simply be natural,
consistent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in Shakespeare a
barbarian, and a Philistine in Milton.
Nevertheless, if we are to obey the perhaps rather childish impulse of
preference and selection among the highest works of the highest among
poets, I will avow that to my personal instinct or apprehension _Marion
de Lorme_ seems a yet more perfect and pathetic masterpiece than even
_Hernani_ itself. The always generous and loyal Dumas placed it at the
very head of his friend's dramatic works. Written, as most readers (I
presume) will remember, before its predecessor on the stage, it was
prohibited on the insanely fatuous pretext that the presentation of King
Louis the Thirteenth was an indirect affront to the majesty of King
Charles the Tenth. After that luckless dotard had been driven off his
throne, it was at once proposed to produce the hitherto interdicted play
before an audience yet palpitating with the thrill of revolution and
resentment. But the chivalrous loyalty of Victor Hugo refused to accept
a facile and factitious triumph at the expense of an exiled old man,
over the ruins of a shattered old cause. The play was not permitted by
its author to enter till the spring of the following year on its
inevitable course of glory. It is a curious and memorable fact that the
most tender-hearted of all great poets had originally made the hero of
this tragedy leave the heroine unforgiven for the momentary and
reluctant relapse into shame by which she had endeavored to repurchase
his forfeited life; and that Prosper Mérimée should have been the
first, Marie Dorval the second, to reclaim a little mercy for the
penitent. It is to their pleading that we owe the sublime pathos of the
final parting between Marion and Didier.
In one point it seems to me that this immortal masterpiece may perhaps
be reasonably placed, with _Le Roi s'amuse_ and _Ruy Blas_, in triune
supremacy at the head of Victor Hugo's plays. The wide range of poetic
abilities, the harmonious variety of congregated powers, displayed in
these three great tragedies through almost infinite variations of terror
and pity and humor and sublime surprise, will seem to some readers,
whose reverence is no less grateful for other gifts of the same great
hand, unequalled at least till the advent in his eighty-first year of
_Torquemada._
Victor Hugo was not yet thirty when all these triumphs lay behind him.
In the twenty-ninth year of a life which would seem fabulous and
incredible in the record of its achievements if divided by lapse of time
from all possible proof of its possibility by the attestation of dates
and facts, he published in February _Notre-Dame de Paris_, in November
_Les Feuilles d'Automne_: that the two dreariest months of the year
might not only "smell April and May," but outshine July and August. The
greatest of all tragic romances has a Grecian perfection of structure,
with a Gothic intensity of pathos. To attempt the praise of such a work
would be only less idle than to refuse it. Terror and pity, with eternal
fate for key-note to the strain of story, never struck deeper to men's
hearts through more faultless evolution of combining circumstance on the
tragic stage of Athens. Louis the Eleventh has been painted by many
famous hands, but Hugo's presentation of him, as compared for example
with Scott's, is as a portrait by Velasquez to a portrait by Vandyke.
The style was a new revelation of the supreme capacities of human
speech: the touch of it on any subject of description or of passion is
as the touch of the sun for penetrating irradiation and vivid evocation
of life.
From the _Autumn Leaves_ to the _Songs of the Twilight_, and again from
the _Inner Voices_ to the _Sunbeams and Shadows_, the continuous jet of
lyric song through a space of ten fertile years was so rich in serene
and various beauty that the one thing notable in a flying review of its
radiant course is the general equality of loveliness inform and color,
which is relieved and heightened at intervals by some especial example
of a beauty more profound or more sublime. The first volume of the four,
if I mistake not, won a more immediate and universal homage than the
rest: its unsurpassed melody was so often the raiment of emotion which
struck home to all hearts a sense of domestic tenderness too pure and
sweet and simple for perfect expression by any less absolute and
omnipotent lord of style, that it is no wonder if in many minds--many
mothers' minds especially--there should at once have sprung up an all
but ineradicable conviction that no subsequent verse must be allowed to
equal or excel the volume which contained such flower-like jewels of
song as the nineteenth and twentieth of these unwithering and
imperishable _Leaves._ But no error possible to a rational creature
could be more serious or more complete than the assumption of any
inferiority in the volume containing the two glorious poems addressed to
Admiral Canaris, the friend (may I be forgiven the filial vanity or
egotism which impels me to record it?) of the present writer's father in
his youth; the two first in date of Hugo's finest satires, the lines
that scourge a backbiter and the lines that brand a traitor (the
resonant and radiant indignation of the latter stands unsurpassed in the
very _Châtiments_ themselves); the two most enchanting aubades or songs
of sunrise that ever had out-sung the birds and out-sweetened the
flowers of the dawn; and--for here I can cite no more—the closing
tribute of lines more bright than the lilies whose name they bear,
offered by a husband's love at the sweet still shrine of motherhood and
wifehood. The first two stanzas of the second aubade are all that can
here be quoted.
L'aurore s'allume,
L'ombre épaisse fuit;
Le rêve et la brume
Vont où va la nuit;
Paupières et roses
S'ouvrent demi-closes;
Du réveil des choses
On entend le bruit.
Tout chante et murmure,
Tout parle à la fois,
Fumée et verdure,
Les nids et les toits;
Le vent parle aux chênes,
L'eau parie aux fontaines;
Toutes les haleines
Deviennent des voix.
And in each of the two succeeding volumes there is, among all their
other things of price, a lyric which may even yet be ranked with the
highest subsequent work of its author for purity of perfection, for
height and fulness of note, for music and movement and informing spirit
of life. We ought to have in English, but I fear--or rather I am only
too sure--we have not, a song in which the sound of the sea is rendered
as in that translation of the trumpet-blast of the night-wind, with all
its wails and pauses and fluctuations and returns, done for once into
human speech and interpreted into spiritual sense forever. For
instinctive mastery of its means and absolute attainment of its end, for
majesty of living music and fidelity of sensitive imagination, there is
no lyric poem in any language more wonderful or more delightful.