_For whom the very darkness is clear,..._ and great sweet sorrow, giving comfort and smiling, _With her austere face from which there shines A clearness beyond nature,..._ and _Death serene with her great, soft eyes._ A symphony of harmonious and pure voices. Not one of them had the full sonorousness of such national trumpets as were Corneille and Hugo: but how much deeper and more subtle in expression was their music! The richest music in Europe of to-day. Olivier said to Christophe, who was silent: "Do you understand now?" Christophe in his turn bade him be silent. In spite of himself, and although he preferred more manly music, yet he drank in the murmuring of the woods and fountains of the soul which came whispering to his ears. Amid the passing struggles of the nations they sang the eternal youth of the world, the _Sweet goodness of Beauty._ While humanity, _Screaming with terror and yelping its complaint Marched round and round a barren gloomy field,_ while millions of men and women wore themselves out in wrangling for the bloody rags of liberty, the fountains and the woods sang on: "Free!... Free!... _Sanctus, Sanctus...._" And yet they slept not in any dream selfishly serene. In the choir of the poets there were not wanting tragic voices: voices of pride, voices of love, voices of agony. A blind hurricane, mad, intoxicated _With its own rough force or gentleness profound,_ tumultuous forces, the epic of the illusions of those who sing the wild fever of the crowd, the conflicts of human gods, the breathless toilers, _Faces inky black and golden peering through darkness and mist, Muscular backs stretching, or suddenly crouching Round mighty furnaces and gigantic anvils..._ forging the City of the Future. In the flickering light and shadow falling on the glaciers of the mind there was the heroic bitterness of those solitary souls which devour themselves with desperate joy. * * * * * Many of the characteristics of these idealists seemed to the German more German than French. But all of them had the love for the "fine speech of France" and the sap of the myths of Greece ran through their poetry. Scenes of France and daily life were by some hidden magic transformed in their eyes into visions of Attica. It was as though antique souls had come to life again in these twentieth-century Frenchmen, and longed to fling off their modern garments to appear again in their lovely nakedness. Their poetry as a whole gave out the perfume of a rich civilization that has ripened through the ages, a perfume such as could not be found anywhere else in Europe. It were impossible to forget it once it had been breathed. It attracted foreign artists from every country in the world. They became French poets, almost bigotedly French: and French classical art had no more fervent disciples than these Anglo-Saxons and Flemings and Greeks.