observée, l'amour de la jeune fille." But as the work of a boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there with genuine humor, terror, and pathos, it is not less wonderful than are the author's first odes for ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in traditions of daring, is evident whenever an episode of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic, excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it is in the ballads written between his twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo first showed himself, beyond all question and above all cavil, an original and a great poet. _La Chasse du Burgrave_ and _Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean_ would suffice of themselves to establish that. The fire, the music, the force, the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious little poems must needs, one would think, impress even such readers as might be impervious to the charm of their exquisitely vigorous and dexterous execution. Take for example this one stanza from the ballad last mentioned:-- La cohue, Flot de fer, Frappe, hue, Remplit l'air, Et, profonde, Tourne et gronde Comme une onde Sur la mer. It will of course, I should hope, be understood once for all that when I venture to select for special mention any special poem of Hugo's I do not dream of venturing to suggest that others are not or may not be fully as worthy of homage, or that anything of this incomparable master's work will not requite our study or does not demand our admiration; I do but take leave to indicate in passing some of those which have been to me especially fruitful of enduring delight, and still are cherished in consequence with a peculiar gratitude.