maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men—as Goneril, for example, would have called them—who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendour or magnificence of music than the sea.
Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever,
L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce,
L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse,
La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux,
Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.
There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.
But though every verse has the ring of tested gold, and every touch gives notice of the master's hand, yet the glory even of these Four Days is eclipsed by the Vision of Dante. Far apart and opposite as they stand in all matters of poetic style and method—Dante writing with the rigid and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with the rushing yet harmonious profusion of a Pindar—the later master is the only modern poet who could undertake without absurdity or presumption to put words worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. The brazen clatter of Byron's Prophecy was not redeemed or brought into tune by the noble energy and sound insight of the political sympathies expressed in the accent of a stump-orator to the tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's falls often as solid and weighty and sure, as full in significance of perfect and pregnant sound, as even a
