Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes of the moon. This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries: “LE CLAIR DE LUNE. “‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez Et priez pour les trépassés.’ --_Le cri du crieur de nuit._ “Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or! “Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas. “Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui battait sa femme. “Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise. “Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée. “Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!” “MOONLIGHT. “‘Wake, men who sleep, And pray for the dead.’ --_Cry of the night-watchman._ “Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden carolus![3] “Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper. “But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence. The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart beating his wife.[4] “The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch, rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.