Page 7.
The Swallows. Jean Pierre Claris de Florian was born in I755 at Basses-Cevennes. He suffered great hardships during the first French Revolution. He was thrown into prison, and contracted in captivity the illness of which he shortly after died. His fables are well known.
Page 8.
The Young Captive. The heroine of this well-known poem by André Chénier, who was himself a victim of the Revolution, was the beautiful Aimée de Coigny, Duchess de Fleury.
Page 10.
The Butterfly. Like Charles Nodier's, Xavier De Maistre's strength lay in his prose; he wrote little in the form of verse. Madame Cottin in her 'Exiles of Siberia' quite spoiled the original and beautiful story of De Maistre. Of the piece given here, we may mention, that it had been translated into Russian, then retranslated into French verse by one of the Secretaries to the Russian Embassy, who did not know its origin. The 'Fall of the Leaves' by Millevoye had a similar destiny.
Page 13.
The Leaf. The oak alluded to in this poem was Napoleon, of whom to the last the poet was a faithful adherent. We append a translation of this piece by Lord Macaulay, taken from his Miscellaneous Writings:
'Thou poor leaf, so sear and frail,
Sport of every wanton gale,
Whence and whither dost thou fly,
Through this bleak autumnal sky?
On a noble oak I grew,
Green, and broad, and fair to view;
But the Monarch of the shade
By the tempest low was laid.
From that time I wander o'er
Wood and valley, hill and moor,
Wheresoe'er the wind is blowing,
Nothing caring, nothing knowing:
Thither go I, whither goes,
Glory's laurel, Beauty's rose.'
Page 14.
Romance. Chateaubriand's prose is poetry, but he has written very little verse, and that little is not of a high order. Few are gifted to excel in both.
