gradual fall back to the two-syllabic. From the life of the Turkish seraglio it wings its flight to the tents of the Bedouins in the desert; from the desert as it is to-day to the desert as it was in the days when Buonaberdi overshadowed it with the wings of his eagles. Enormous stretches of sand and water, the ordering and manœuvres of masses of troops, the architecture of towns, the sieges and storming of these towns, are seen with the poet's eye; and at a certain moment a natural association of ideas summons up the picture of great scenes of destruction read of in Bible history. In these last Hugo found his most gorgeous material. And it was also the material nearest akin to his own personality. His imagination was always at > its best in dealing with the monstrous. The original Pegasus was, in the literal sense of the word, a superb monster, and that is just what Hugo's Pegasus is, in the figurative. He writes "Le Feu du Ciel," the first poem in the book, the last in chronological order. We see the awful black cloud sailing across the sky. Whence has it come? Whither is it bound? No one knows. Hovering above the sea, it asks the Lord if it shall dry up the waters with its fires. No! answers the Lord, and onward it hurries, driven by His breath. Over the beautiful bays of the Mediterranean, over the fair corn lands of Egypt it passes, but the Lord still gives no signal to stop. Over the desert it flies, over the ruins of ancient Babel. It asks: Is it here? But still onward it must go. In the night time it reaches the magnificent sister citiesSodom and Gomorrah-whose inhabitants have fallen asleep after their wild, voluptuous revels. Now the Lord gives the signal. The cloud opens, and from its flaming gorge pours a torrent of fire and sulphur and brimstone upon the doomed cities, until agate and porphyry and idols and marble colossi melt like wax, and the dazzling flames envelop and destroy everything living in the houses and the streets. Towards morning the ruin of old Babel is seen to lift its head above the mountain-ridge to see and enjoy the end of the play. It knows all about it; it also in its day has had experience of the love that chasteneth. This is, as already remarked, not poetry in a minor key; some critics actually accused it of coldness; but if ever there was an unwarrantable accusation this was one. We feel as if the poet had actually seen it all, and had painted it with a brush like that pine which Heine would fain have torn from the Norwegian cliffs and dipped in the fire of Etna, to write with it the name of his beloved across the expanse of heaven. These Orientales became the model for Romantic lyric poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly, the terrible (Tò davóv as the Greeks said), and incorporate it in his verse, assured of his power to penetrate it all with poetry, to impart transparency to all these shadows and immerge all the blackness in a poetic sea of light. What he once wrote of the earth may be applied to his own lyric poetry. He describes the poor, stony, niggardly soil, which unwillingly yields man his daily bread; burning deserts here, polar ice there; cities from which mercy and hope have departed wringing their hands. He paints death, an eyeless spectre which generally seizes the best first; tells of seas where ships are wrecked in the night, and of continents where howling war swings its torches and races fall furiously one upon the other. And, he concludes, of all this is composed a star in the firmament of heaven. VIII HUGO AND DE MUSSET SCARCELY had Victor Hugo completed Les Orientales before he set to work upon a series of poems of a completely different character. Feuilles d'Automne conquered a new territory for French lyric poetry, a domain in which the personal element was as conspicuously present as it had been absent in Les Orientales. Hugo had married at the age of twenty on the strength of a trifling pension granted him by Louis XVIII. The dowry of his beloved bride, Adèle Foucher, was 2000 francs. The young couple lived for a number of years in straitened circumstances; but after the Hernani battle was won, Hugo's writings began to bring him in thousands, which rose to hundreds of thousands, and finally to millions. Still, the poor home was a happy one, and when, at the age of twenty-five, Hugo appeared before the public as a literary revolutionist, he was the father of a family. In Feuilles d'Automne the poet presents his readers with pictures and thoughts of his own home. They are memories of his childhood and his beloved dead, remembrances of his mother's tenderness, of his father's soldierly figure and mien, of Napoleon, whom, standing by his father's side as a child, he had once seen. He unburdens his heart to intimate friends, confesses to them the sadness and the doubts induced in him by the hard battle of life. There are love poems too, matchless ones. He finds his first love-letters and reads them with a heart full of sadness and of longing for the vanished first freshness of youth. gives us the poetry of his home. This was a side of life which almost all the great poets of the world had left untouched. Shakespeare had no home, and his conjugal He ་ relations were not such as to deserve writing about. Schiller and Goethe wrote few poems to their wives, and none about their family life. What Byron had thought fit to communicate to the world of such matters was the reverse of edifying. Oehlenschläger, whose personal circumstances and literary position in many respects resemble Hugo's, did not marry his Christiane till her youth was past. When he writes of his wife his tone is more dutiful than chivalrous; she is rather his Morgiana than his Gulnare; and in his poems about his children there is a touch of parental vanity; he writes of them in the style in which royal personages sometimes allude to theirs on public occasions; we feel that he regards them as beings whose welfare must be of importance to every one. Hugo avoided these pitfalls. Not that Adéle Foucher remained the central female figure in Hugo's life during all the years when he was singing of his home. Feuilles d'Automne is the last collection. of his poems in which he could truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the rehearsals of his Lucrèce Borgia, he became intimate with the young and beautiful, though talentless, actress, Juliette Drouet (her real name was Julienne Gauvain), whom he had chosen to play the very small part of the Princess Negroni. This lady's contemporaries write with enthusiasm of her beauty, which is said to have combined the purity of outline of the Greek statue with the poetic expression which we attribute to Shakespeare's heroines. In Hugo's tragedy she had only two words to say, merely walked across the stage; yet Théophile Gautier, after describing her lovely dress, writes thus of her performance: "She resembled a lizard that had erected itself on its tail, so wavy, supple, and serpentlike was her carriage. And with all her charm, how skilfully she managed to insinuate something poisonous into her words! With what mocking and perturbing agility did she avoid the attentions of the handsome Venetian noblemen!" Juliette Drouet's profile was antique, and she had a profusion of beautiful hair. Pradier, the sculptor, has im Sied-lanth Read "Le Livre mortalised her in the statue of the city of Lille in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. When Hugo made her acquaintance he was thirty-one and she twenty-seven; and their connection lasted until her death, that is, for nearly fifty years. After 1833 she accompanied him on his travels, and both during and after his exile "Madame Juliette Drouet " lived in his house. His wife, between whom and Sainte-Beuve there was soon a liaison which the latter's literary indiscretions made unnecessarily public, seems as long as she lived to have d'Amour" of Saborne patiently with Hugo's inconstancy; and Hugo's letters Beuve show that he, in his turn, showed both dignity and great delicacy of feeling in the way in which he received SainteBeuve's intimation of his passion for Madame Hugo. In his poetry, at least, Hugo remained united by the tenderest of ties to his home. It is in the Chants du Crépuscule, which were published in 1835, consequently long after he and Juliette Drouet had become closely connected, that (in the poem "Date lilia !") he writes of his wife as the being to whom he says: Toujours! and who answers: Partout! And it is in this same poem that we have the perfectly charming picture of the young mother followed by her four children, the youngest of whom still walks with tottering steps: "Oh! si vous rencontrez quelque part sous les cieux Une femme au front pur, au pas grave, aux doux yeux, Si, loin des feux, des voix, des bruits et des splendeurs, |