parsemée de souvenirs. Rien ne manque à ce charmant jardin d'un autre âge: ni quelques ruines gothiques se cachant dans un lieu agreste, ni le mausolée inconnu qui, au détour d'une allée, surprend notre âme et lui commande de penser à l'éternité. Des allées sinueuses et ombragées aboutissent à des horizons subits. Ainsi la pensée du poete, après avoir suivi de capricieux méandres, débouche sur les vastes perspectives du passé ou de l'avenir; mais ces ciels sont trop vastes pour être généralement purs, et la température du climat trop chaude pour n'y pas amasser des orages. Le promeneur en contemplant ces étendues voilées de deuil, sent monter à ses yeux les pleurs de l'hystérie, hysterical tears. Les fleurs se penchent vaincues, et les oiseaux ne parlent qu'à voix basse. Après un éclair précurseur, un coup de tonnerre a retenti: c'est l'explosion lyrique: enfn un déluge inévitable de larmes rend à toutes ces choses, prostrées, souffrantes et découragées, la fraîcheur et la solidité d'une nouvelle jeunesse.'
Page 36.
The Solitary Nest. Madame Desbordes-Valmore's 'Solitary Nest,’ like most of her pieces of the same genre, has a music which a translation can never adequately render.
Page 37.
The Foundling. Alexandre Soumet lived between the Classical and Romantic schools of French Poetry. He had been brought up in the old school, and could not therefore join the new, except in a timid and hesitating way, although he felt the superiority of it. His first success was in the dramatic line, 'Clytemnestre' and 'Saul,' tragedies which opened to him the doors of the French Academy. He next tried his hand at Epic poems, 'Jeanne d'Arc,' pronounced by a very competent French critic to be a complete miscarriage, a poem of which 'the plan is defective, the colour false, and the tone declamatory'—and 'La Divine Epopée,' on the subject of the Redemption, a subject which, as already handled by Milton in the 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained,' would have been avoided as likely to provoke damaging comparisons by a wiser writer. Soumet is said to have always kept the plume of an eagle on his desk, not to write with, but 'to have always present to his thoughts that a poet such as he aspired to be must build his eyrie on the highest summits,—must wheel in the regions of the sky.' 'This cursed plume of the eagle,' says M. Léon de Wailly, 'was his ruin.' Had he not attempted so much, he could have left a more durable reputation. He had sufficient means to defray a moderate ambition, but he wasted his patrimony in mad enterprises, like many another conceited literary spendthrift. As it is, writers with less merit and less ambition, placed in circumstances more propitious, have, simply by attempting what was in their power to accomplish, acquired titles more real and more durable than Soumet, to the esteem of posterity.
'La Nuit de Noel,' and the piece we give here, 'La Pauvre Fille,' have been much admired, and have been quoted in almost every book of Selections,
