all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle.
This poem, which so many hearts must have treasured among their choicest memories for now so many years, has found at length its fellow in the final volume of the book. There is even more savour of the sea in the great lyric landscape called Les paysans au bord de la mer than in the idyllic interior called Les pauvres gens. There we felt the sea-wind and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window; but here we feel all the sweep of the west wind's wings, and see all the rush of rain along the stormy shore that the flock of leaping waves has whitened with the shreddings of their fleece. We remember in Les Voix Intérieures the all but matchless music of the song of the sea-wind's trumpet, and in the notes of this new tune we find at last that music matched and deepened and prolonged. In the great lyric book which gives us the third of the four blasts blown from Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, there are visions as august and melodies as austere as this; but outside the vast pale of the master's work we should look for the likeness of such songs in vain. The key of all its tenderness if not of all its terror is struck in these two first verses.
Les pauvres gens de la côte,
L'hiver, quand la mer est haute
Et qu'il fait nuit, Viennent où finit la terre
Voir les flots pleins de mystère
Et pleins de bruit.
