with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close,
Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?
In Le Cimetière d'Eylau, a poem to which we have now in the third series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (Paroles de mon Oncle), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad; it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.
The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise.
