Then the terrible music of the flight of evil spirits—'troupeau lourd et rapide'—grows as it were note by note and minute by minute up to its full height of tempest, and again relapses and recedes into the subsiding whisper of the corresponsive close.
Ce bruit vague
Qui s'endort,
C'est la vague
Sur le bord;
C'est la plainte
Presque éteinte
D'une sainte
Pour un mort.
On doute
La nuit . . .
J'écoute:—
Tout fuit,
Tout passe;
L'espace
Efface
Le bruit.
And here, like Shelley, was Hugo already the poet of freedom, a champion of the sacred right and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a royalist education, the crust of reactionary misconceptions, had already begun to drop off; not yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive and to understand the doctrine of human right, the conception of the common weal, as distinguished from imaginary duties and opposed to hereditary claims.
The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was illuminated by the issue of these passionate and radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his generous and lifelong campaign or
