In the course of the next four years Victor Hugo published the last two great works which were to be dated from the haven of his exile. It would be the very ineptitude of impertinence for any man's presumption to undertake the classification or registry of his five great romances in positive order of actual merit: but I may perhaps be permitted to say without fear of deserved rebuke that none is to me personally a treasure of greater price than _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._ The splendid energy of the book makes the superhuman energy of the hero seem not only possible but natural, and his triumph over all physical impossibilities not only natural but inevitable. Indeed, when glancing at the animadversions of a certain sort of critics on certain points or passages in this and in the next romance of its author, I am perpetually inclined to address them in the spirit--were it worth while to address them in any wise at all--after the fashion if not after the very phrase of Mirabeau's reply to a less impertinent objector. Victor Hugo's acquaintance with navigation or other sciences may or may not have been as imperfect as Shakespeare's acquaintance with geography and natural history; the knowledge of such a man's ignorance or inaccuracy in detail is in either case of exactly equal importance: and the importance of such knowledge is for all men of sense and candor exactly equivalent to zero. Between the tragedy of Gilliatt and the tragedy of Gwynplaine Victor Hugo published nothing but the glorious little poem on the slaughter of Mentana, called _La Voix de Guernesey_, and (in the same year) the eloquent and ardent effusion of splendid and pensive enthusiasm prefixed to the manual or guide-book which appeared on the occasion of the international exhibition at Paris three years before the collapse of the government which then kept out of France the Frenchmen most regardful of her honor and their own. In the year preceding that collapse he published _L'Homme qui Rit_; a book which those who read it aright have always ranked and will always rank among his masterpieces. A year and eight months after the fall of the putative Bonaparte he published the terrible register of _L'Année Terrible._ More sublime wisdom, more compassionate equity, more loyal self-devotion never found expression in verse of more varied and impassioned and pathetic magnificence. The memorial poem in which Victor Hugo so royally repaid, with praise beyond all price couched in verse beyond all praise, the loyal and constant devotion of Théophile Gautier, bears the date of All Souls' Day in the autumn of 1872. For tenderness and nobility of mingling aspiration and recollection, recollection of combatant and triumphant youth, aspiration towards the serene and sovereign ascension out of age through death, these majestic lines are worthy not merely of eternal record, but far more than that--of a distinct and a distinguished place among the poems of Victor Hugo.