tion may suffice—which stands out as a crowning splendour among Les Rayons et les Ombres, not even Hugo's own eloquence, had it been the work (which is impossible) of any other great poet in all time, could have said anything adequate at all. Not even Coleridge and Shelley, the sole twin sovereigns of English lyric poetry, could have produced this little piece of lyric work by combination and by fusion of their gifts. The pathetic truthfulness and the simple manfulness of the mountain shepherd's distraction and devotion might have been given in ruder phrase and tentative rendering by the nameless ballad-makers of the border: but here is a poem which unites something of the charm of Clerk Saunders and The Wife of Usher's Well with something of the magic of Christabel and the Ode to the West Wind; a thing, no doubt, impossible; but none the less obviously accomplished.[1]
- ↑ In the winter of the year which in spring had seen Les Rayons et les Ombres come forth to kindle and refresh the hearts of readers, Victor Hugo published an ode in the same key as those To the Column and To the Arch of Triumph, on the return and reinterment of the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous eloquence, the place of this poem in any collection of its author's works is distinctly and unmistakably marked out by every quality it has and by every quality it wants. In style and in sentiment, in opinion and in rhythm, it is one with the national and political poems which had already been published by the author since the date of his Orientales: in other words, it is in every possible point utterly and absolutely unlike the poems long afterwards to be written by the author in exile. Its old place, therefore, in all former editions, at the end of the volume containing the poems previously published in the same year, is obviously the only right one, and rationally the only one possible. By what inexplicable and inconceivable caprice it has been promoted to a place in the so-called édition définitive, on the mighty roll of the Légende des Siècles, at the head of the fourth volume of that crowning work of modern times, I am hopelessly and helplessly at a loss to conjecture. But, at all risk of impeachment on
