defence of Garibaldi for the offence of coming to their aid, and to pass at once from the clamour of the Assembly to the silence of sudden death, beside the corpse of a beloved son; to offer shelter to his enemies, and to be hunted from that shelter himself: these were things he had yet to do and to endure.
The poem opens with a prelude at once prophetic and satiric, tender and wise and full of noble scorn and nobler pity; the verse which sets a crown on the head of the people and a brand on the face of the mob is such as it is given but to one man in an age to write, and that by no means in every age. Then, for the first and fatal month of August 1870, we have a poem terrible as the occasion which called it forth, fit alike to serve as prologue to the poems of the months which follow or as an epilogue to the "Chatiments" which went before. That nothing after Sedan might be wanting to the fugitive assassin once elect of the party of Barabbas, the scourge of imperishable verse is added to the branding-iron of historic fact.
The poems of the siege at once demand and defy commentary; they should be studied in their order as parts of one tragic symphony. From the overture which tells of the old glory of Germany before turning to France with a cry of inarticulate love, to the sad majestic epilogue which seals up the sorrowful record of the days of capitulation, the various and continuous harmony flows forward through light and shadow, with bursts of thunder and tempest and interludes of sunshine and sweet air. In that last poem for February we see as it were the agony of faith; before the sight of evil inseparable from
