The form in French is not, to our ears, successfully achieved; it seems to take a hesitating step upon the road which Paul Fort, in his _Ballades Françaises_ has tramped along so vigorously, but in so doubtful a direction. Fort has published several volumes, which have been much praised by many of the younger critics, in which verse is printed as verse--verse which is sometimes rhymed and sometimes unrhymed, sometimes regular and sometimes irregular; and along with this verse there is a great deal of merely rhythmical prose, which is not more like verse than any page of _Salammbo_, or _À Rebours_, or _L'Étui de Nacre._ Now it seems to us that this indiscriminate mingling of prose and verse is for the good neither of prose nor of verse. It is a breaking down of limits without any conquest of new country. The mere printing of verse as prose, which Maeterlinck has favored, seems to us a travesty unworthy of a writer of beautiful prose or of beautiful verse. _Le Temple Enseveli_ is by no means equal, as literature or as philosophy, to _Le Trésor des Humbles_, or even to _La Sagesse et la Destinée_, but it is, like everything which Maeterlinck writes, full of brooding honesty of thought and of a grave moral beauty of feeling. It is the work of a thinker who "waits patiently," like a Christian upon divine grace, upon the secret voices which come to us out of the deepest places in our nature. He is absolutely open-minded, his trust and his skepticism are alike an homage to truth. If what he has to say to us is not always "_la sagesse même_," it is at least the speech of one who has sought after wisdom more heedfully than any other writer of our time. _Le Double Jardin_ is a collection of essays which form a kind of postscript to _Le Temple Enseveli._ They are somewhat less abstract, perhaps a little more casual, than the essays in that book, and are concerned with subjects as varied as _The Wrath of the Bee, The Motor-Car_, and _Old-fashioned Flowers._ Maeterlinck has never written anything in prose more graceful, more homely, and more human than some of these pages, particularly those on flowers. In _The Leaf of Olive_ and in _Death and the Crown_ he carries speculation beyond the limits of our knowledge, and "thinks nobly," not of the soul alone, but also of the intelligence of man in its conflict with the deadly, unintelligent oppositions of the natural forces of the world. Such pages are fortifying, and we can not but be grateful for what is plausible in their encouragement. But the larger part of the book is made up of notes by the way, which have all the more charm because they are not too systematically arranged.