there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form,
forged into substance.
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth
with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:--
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur
De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.
From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet
has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book
was conceived--a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously
imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and
arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty
of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find
that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with
the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus--the
reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the
_Légende des Siècles_ ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a
few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the
impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness
and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for
quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only
be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem.
And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible
commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to
gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast
disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light--"le reste effrayant de Babel"--a
palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:--
Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent,
De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent,
La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau.