understand the following sentence, and admire its brevity:--"I tried to express what I really felt, while apparently expressing what I did not feel--to be honest to myself and to mislead her." Here, again, is a mournful little picture of life:--"A brigade is marching slowly along a road. The enemy's troops, in ambush on both sides, make terrible havoc with their rifles, and in the end there is an open fight. The brigade succeeds in putting the enemy to flight, and when the general arrives in the evening at the nearest town with the lucky survivors of his force and the torn remnants of his flag, this is called a triumph. When some one part of our plans, our ambition, our love, has suffered less than the rest, we call this glory or success." And the following is an apt little simile. It is of jealous love Sainte-Beuve is writing;--"At this stage, when it desires absolute possession, when it is irritated and embittered by the slightest opposition, nay, even by the beloved object's affection for others, I can only compare it with those Asiatic despots who, in order to clear the way to the throne for themselves, assassinate all their nearest relations, even their own brothers." With _Les Pensées d'Août_ Sainte-Beuve closed his career as a poet. It is the only one of his poetical ventures which was quite unsuccessful, and the poems which the volume contains are certainly his coldest; yet it seems to me, though my opinion is unsupported by any other critic, that it is in this work he first displays marked originality. It is realistic to an extent which is quite unique in the lyric poetry of the Romantic School; no poet had yet ventured to make such free use of the language and the surroundings of daily life. In the North, where a poet even to-day would hardly have the courage to give an omnibus or a railway platform a place in a lyric poem, such a work as _Les Pensées d'Août_ would still almost be regarded in the light of a specimen of the poetry of the future. In it, as in _Les Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, we find several of the characteristics of the English Lake School transplanted to French soil. Sainte-Beuve, like the Englishmen, presents us with simple, sober pictures of real life, and his style, like theirs, is founded upon the conviction that there ought not to be any essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical compositions. But in Sainte-Beuve's poems we have, instead of the strange want of crispness and point of the English poems, a genuinely French dramatic tension. Each of them is a little drama developed within the limits of a short lyric narrative.