In the volume of verse which followed _Les Orientales_ after an interval of two years, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ (1831), Hugo is a master of his instrument, and does not need to display his miracles of skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years, but not therefore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were almost inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here the lyrism is that of memory and of the heart--intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to the tranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a faith in God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks forth-- "_Et j'ajoute a ma lyre une corde d'airain._" The spirit of the _Chants du Crespuscule_ (1835) is one of doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy is already waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two things that are majestic--the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular flood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings. But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of weltering mist. _Les Voix Interieures_ (1837) resumes the tendencies of the two preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. is reverently saluted; the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people grows clearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear; the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in the symbolic _La Vache_, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of all living things. In _Les Rayons et les Ombres_ (1840), Nature is not only the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's _Le Lac_ and Musset's _Souvenir_ find a companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in the _Tristesse d'Olympio_; reminiscences of childhood are magically preserved in the poem of the _Feuillantines_. From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressed his spirits. In 1843 his daughter Leopoldine and her husband of a few short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much to magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exile who launched his prose invective _Napoleon le Petit_. A year later appeared _Les Chatiments_, in which satire, with some loss of critical discernment, is infused with a passionate lyrical quality, unsurpassed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur. The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored him to himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errors of genius.