This is not from Maurice Maeterlinck; it was written by a hard-headed man and lovable teacher, the late Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol. Not intended as a text, but merely to show that the lift of spirit, which is the sign manual of mysticism, does not prelude the practical. It is a fresh visual angle from which are viewed the things of heaven and earthly things. In his youth, possibly to escape the sterilities of the code--for he was an advocate by profession---Maeterlinck took up the mystic writers though the drama pulled him hard, as it ever does with the preëlected. Little danger of this ardent young man weighing, as do many, the theatre in the scales of commerce. As with Ibsen, the stage was an escape for Maeterlinck; it liberated ideas, poetic, dramatic, mystic, which had become intolerable, ideas which turned his brain. That art of which Pinero so eloquently writes, "The great, the fascinating, and most difficult art,... compression of life without falsification," could never have signified a gold mine for Maeterlinck as it did for Robert Louis Stevenson. To the Belgian it was not a speculation, but a consecration. To it he brought that "concentration of thought and sustained intensity" which Pinero deems imperative in the curriculum of a dramatic artist. Upon the anvil of his youthful dreams did Maeterlinck forge his little plays for marionettes. Shadowy they are, brief transcripts of emotion, but valuable in illustrating unity of purpose, of mood, of _tone_. Herein lies their superiority to Browning's more elaborate structures. Before he ventured into the maze of plotting, Maeterlinck was content with simple types of construction. The lyric musician in this poet, the lover of beauty, led him to make his formula a musical one. The dialogue of the first plays seems like new species of musical notation. If there is not rhyme there is rhythm, interior rhythm, and an alluring assonance. Hence we get pages burdened with repetitions and also the "crossing fire" of jewelled words. Apart from their spirit the lines of this poet are sonorously beautiful. In the "purple" mists of his early manner a weaker man might have perished. Not so Maeterlinck. He is first the thinker--a thinker of strange thoughts independent of their verbal settings. He soon escaped preciosity in diction; it was monotony of mood that chained him to his many experimentings.