the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this—
Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait—
there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:—
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur
De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.
From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived—a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus—the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the Légende des Siècles ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the
