I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of the writers and poets whom I will call the moderate. For a long time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Tasso,--these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the first have completely gained their cause, and matters are quite the other way about: the great and primitive geniuses reign and triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are still naïve and original in thought and expression, poets such as Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper rank; while the moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like disdain and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It seems to me that there is room for all, and that none need be sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and which like them burst forth with something of strangeness and harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces which are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive expression, clothe themselves with elegance and sweetness. And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of the familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out the nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. "Here," he says, "are discoveries for you,--deserts, mountains, the large horizons of Italy; what remained to discover? That which was nearest to us, here in the centre of our own France. As happens always, what is most simple comes at the last." In the same way he praised the refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the purer and more homely verses of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes us, yet greater knowledge brings us back to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed, there is something almost pathetic in the contrast between the life of this laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in which he fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.