If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!... 0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud. Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; What if my leaves are falling like its own? The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; And by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and sympathy in them; for instance: The fountains mingle with the river, And the river with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion.... See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another... And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea. and: I love all thou lovest, Spirit of Delight; The fresh earth in new leaves dressed, And the starry night, Autumn evening and the morn When the golden mists are born. I love snow and all the forms Of the radiant frost; I love waves and winds and storms-- Everything almost Which is Nature's, and may be Untainted by man's misery. To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a bitter ingredient in their poetry. Let us now turn to France. LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO