Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma tête; Son vol éblouissant apaisait la tempête, Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit. --Qu'est-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit? Lui dis-je. Il répondit:--Je viens prendre ton âme.-- Et j'eus peur, car je vis que c'était une femme; Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras: --Que me restera-t-il? car tu t'envoleras.-- Il ne répondit pas; le ciel que l'ombre assiège S'éteignait...--Si tu prends mon âme, m'écriai-je. Où l'emporteras-tu? montre-moi dans quel lieu. Il se taisait toujours.--O passant du ciel bleu, Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie?-- Et la nuit augmentait sur mon âme ravie, Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour. Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes. If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book of the _Contemplations_, it would yet be indisputable among those who know anything of poetry that he was among the foremost in the front rank of the greatest poets of all time. Here, did space allow, it would be necessary for criticism with any pretense to adequacy to say something of every poem in turn, to pause for observation of some beauty beyond reach of others at every successive page. In the first poem a sublime humility finds such expression as should make manifest to the dullest eye not clouded by malevolence and insolent conceit that when this greatest of modern poets asserts in his own person the prerogative and assumes for his own spirit the high office of humanity, to confront the darkest problem and to challenge the utmost force of intangible and invisible injustice as of visible and tangible iniquity, of all imaginable as of all actual evil, of superhuman indifference as well as of human wrongdoing, it is no merely personal claim that he puts forward, no vainly egotistic arrogance that he displays; but the right of a reasonable conscience and the duty of a righteous faith, common to ail men alike in whom intelligence of right and wrong, perception of duty or conception of conscience can be said to exist at all. If there be any truth in the notion of any difference between evil and good more serious than the conventional and convenient fabrications of doctrine and assumption, then assuredly the meanest of his creatures in whom the perception of this difference was not utterly extinct would have a right to denounce an omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the sentence inflicted by the thunders of his own unrighteous judgment. How profound and intense was the disbelief of Victor Hugo in the rule or in the existence of any such superhuman malefactor could not be better shown than by the almost polemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that need for faith in a central conscience and a central will on which he has insisted again and again as a crowning and indispensable, requisite for moral and spiritual