Scarce had he spoke, When fiercely from the far horizon broke The wildest of the children, fullest fraught With terror, that till then the North had brought. The tree holds good; the reed it bends. The wind redoubled might expends, And so well works that from his bed Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead. Here is that fable of La Fontaine's graced by the hand of Bryant upon it as translator. It is entitled "Love and Folly:" Love's worshipers alone can know The thousand mysteries that are his; His blazing torch, his twanging bow, His blooming age are mysteries. A charming science--but the day Were all too short to con it o'er; So take of me this little lay, A sample of its boundless lore. As once, beneath the fragrant shade Of myrtles fresh, in heaven's pure air, The children, Love and Folly, played-- A quarrel rose betwixt the pair. Love said the gods should do him right-- But Folly vowed to do it then, And struck him, o'er the orbs of sight, So hard he never saw again. His lovely mother's grief was deep, She called for vengeance on the deed; A beauty does not vainly weep, Nor coldly does a mother plead. A shade came o'er the eternal bliss That fills the dwellers of the skies; Even stony-hearted Nemesis And Rhadamanthus wiped their eyes. "Behold," she said, "this lovely boy," While streamed afresh her graceful tears, "Immortal, yet shut out from joy And sunshine all his future years. The child can never take, you see A single step without a staff-- The harshest punishment would be Too lenient for the crime by half." All said that Love had suffered wrong, And well that wrong should be repaid; When weighed the public interest long, And long the party's interest weighed, And thus decreed the court above-- "Since Love is blind from Folly's blow, Let Folly be the guide of Love, Where'er the boy may choose to go." In the fable of the "Rat Retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies the monks. With French _finesse_ he hits his mark by expressly avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No, but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always ready with his help to the needful!"