Dieu ne veut pas que rien, même l'obscurité, Même l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile, Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'étais inutile! Dans le gouffre à jamais retomber éperdu; Et le lien sacré du service rendu, A travers l'ombre affreuse et la céleste sphère, Joint l'échelon de nuit aux marches de lumière. Hope is indeed the keynote of Hugo's poetry. In the darkest days of 1871, when France was tearing out her own vitals and Paris was destroying itself, he could write thus: Les récits montrent l'un après l'autre leurs têtes, Car les évènements ont leur cap des Tempêtes, Derrière est la clarté. Ces flux et ces reflux, Ces recommencements, ces combats sont voulus, Au-dessus de la haine immense, quelqu'un aime. Ayons foi. Ce n'est pas sans quelque but suprême Que sans cesse, en ce gouffre où rêvent les sondeurs, Un prodigieux vent soufflant des profondeurs, A travers l'âpre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramène Sur tout l'écueil divin toute la mer humaine. (_L'Année Terrible._) See too the beautiful lines written when to public disaster was added private grief for the loss of his son Charles, especially the passage, too long to quote here, in _L'Enterrement_, beginning 'Quand le jeune lutteur....' If, passing from the underlying conception to the actual material of the _Légende_, we ask to what extent the poems can be regarded as history, the answer must be that they are not history at all in the ordinary sense of the word. In his _Préface_ Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect légendaire qui prévaut dans ces deux volumes.' As a matter of fact, there is not a single poem in any of the series which is a narrative based upon actual fact. Of the pieces in the present volume, _Le Mariage de Roland, Aymerillot_, and _Bivar_ are founded on legends. _Éviradnus_ and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ are inventions, and the others are mostly embroideries woven upon ancient themes rather than historical or even legendary pictures. These latter, of which _La Conscience_ is the best instance in this volume, suggest De Vigny's conception: 'Une pensée philosophique, mise en scène sous une forme épique ou dramatique.' Of accuracy in detail and local colour, Hugo was utterly careless. He possessed a capacious, but not an exact, memory, and, provided the general impression produced by a description was the true one, he did not stop to inquire whether every detail was correct. Nor did he always enjoy an extensive knowledge of the epoch which he delineated. But he possessed to the full the poet's faculty of building the whole form and feature of a past age out of a few stray fragments of information. The historical colour of _Ruy Blas_ is said to be based on two French books, carelessly consulted, yet of _Ruy Blas_ M. Paul de Saint-Victor, after making a close study of the period, wrote: 'Ce fragment de siècle que je venais d'exhumer de tant de recherches, je le retrouvais, vivant et