A yet sweeter and sadder and more magical sea-song there was yet to come years after--but only from the lips of an exile. Of the ballad--so to call it, if any term of definition may suffice--which stands out as a crowning splendor among _Les Rayons et les Ombres_, not even Hugo's own eloquence, had it been the work (which is impossible) of any other great poet in all time, could have said anything adequate at all. Not even Coleridge and Shelley, the sole twin sovereigns of English lyric poetry, could have produced this little piece of lyric work by combination and by fusion of their gifts. The pathetic truthfulness and the simple manfulness of the mountain shepherd's distraction and devotion might have been given in ruder phrase and tentative rendering by the nameless ballad-makers of the border: but here is a poem which unites something-of the charm of _Clerk Saunders_ and _The Wife of Usher's Well_ with something of the magic of _Christabel_ and the _Ode to the West Wind_; a thing, no doubt, impossible; but none the less obviously accomplished.[1] The lyric work of these years would have been enough for the energy of another man, for the glory of another poet; it was but a part, it was (I had well nigh said) the lesser part, of its author's labors--if labor be not an improper term for the successive or simultaneous expressions or effusions of his indefatigable spirit. The year after _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ appeared one of the great crowning tragedies of all time, _Le Roi s'amuse._ As the key-note of _Marion de Lorme_ had been redemption by expiation, so the key-note of this play is expiation by retribution. The simplicity, originality, and straightforwardness of the terrible means through which this austere conception is worked out would give moral and dramatic value to a work less rich in the tenderest and sublimest poetry, less imbued with the purest fire of pathetic passion. After the magnificent pleading of the Marquis de Nangis in the preceding play, it must have seemed impossible that the poet should, without a touch of repetition or reiterance, be able again to confront a young king with an old servant, pour forth again the denunciation and appeal of a breaking heart, clothe again the haughtiness of honor, the loyalty of grief, the sanctity of indignation, in words that shine like lightning and verses that thunder like the sea. But the veteran interceding for a nephew's life is a less tragic figure than he who comes to ask account for a daughter's honor. Hugo never merely repeats himself; his miraculous fertility and force of utterance were not more indefatigable and inexhaustible than the fountains of thought and emotion which fed that eloquence with fire. In the seventh scene of the fourth act of _Marion de Lorme_, an old warrior of the days of Henri Quatre comes to plead with the son of his old comrade in arms for the life of his heir, condemned to death as a duelist by the edict of Richelieu.