J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense, Des trous à ma robe en lambeau; Je n'ai rien à la conscience; Ouvre, tombeau. Last comes the magnificent and rapturous hymn of universal redemption from suffering as from sin, the prophetic vision of evil absorbed by good, and the very worst of spirits transfigured into the likeness of the very best, in which the daring and indomitable faith of the seer finds dauntless and supreme expression in choral harmonies of unlimited and illimitable hope. The epilogue which dedicates the book to the daughter whose grave was now forbidden ground to her father--so long wont to keep there the autumnal anniversary of his mourning--is the very crown and flower of the immortal work which it inscribes, if we may say so, rather to the presence than to the memory of the dead. Not till the thirtieth year from the publication of these two volumes was the inexhaustible labor of the spirit which inspired them to cease for a moment--and then, among us at least, for ever. Three years afterwards appeared the first series of the _Légende des Siècles_, to be followed nineteen years later by the second, and by the final complementary volume six years after that: so that between the inception and the conclusion of the greatest single work accomplished in the course of our century a quarter of that century had elapsed--with stranger and more tragic evolution of events than any poet or any seer could have foretold or foreseen as possible. Three years again from this memorable date appeared the great epic and tragic poem of contemporary life and of eternal humanity which gave us all the slowly ripened fruit of the studies and emotions, the passions and the thoughts, the aspiration and the experience, brought finally to their full and perfect end in _Les Misérables._ As the key-note of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ was doom--the human doom of suffering to be nobly or ignobly endured--so the key-note of its author's next romance was redemption by acceptance of suffering and discharge of duty in absolute and entire obedience to the utmost exaction of conscience when it calls for atonement, of love when it calls for sacrifice of all that makes life more endurable than death. It is obvious that no account can here be given of a book which if it required a sentence would require a volume to express the character of its quality or the variety of its excellence--the one unique, the latter infinite as the unique and infinite spirit whose intelligence and whose goodness gave it life.