In October of the same year--the second year of his long exile--a loftier note of no less heavenly melody was sounded by the lyric poet who alone of all his nation has taken his place beside Coleridge and Shelley. The word "passant," as addressed by the soul to the body, is perhaps the very finest expression of his fervent faith in immortality to be found in all the work of Victor Hugo. Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Reine marguerite; aux champs défleuris Bientôt vont souffler le givre et la grêle. --Passant, l'hiver vient, et je lui souris. Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Étoile du soir; les rayons taris Sont tous retournés à l'aube éternelle. --Passant, la nuit vient, et je lui souris. Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Mon âme; joyeuse en mes noirs débris, Tu m'éblouis, fière et rouvrant ton aile. --Passant, la mort vient, et je lui souris. No date is affixed to the divine song of yearning after home and the graves which make holier for every man old enough to have been a mourner the native land which holds them. The play on sound which distinguishes the last repetition of the burden is the crowning evidence that the subtlest effect of pathos and the most austere effect of sublimity may be conveyed through a trick of language familiar in their highest and most serious moods to Æschylus and to Shakespeare. _EXIL_ Si je pouvais voir, ô patrie. Tes amandiers et tes lilas, Et fouler ton herbe fleurie, Hélas! Si je pouvais,--mais, ô mon père, Ô ma mère, je ne peux pas,-- Prendre pour chevet votre pierre, Hélas! Dans le froid cercueil qui vous gêne, Si je pouvais vous parler bas, Mon frère Abel, mon frère Eugène, Hélas! Si je pouvais, ô ma colombe. Et toi, mère, qui t'envolas, M'agenouiller sur votre tombe, Hélas! Oh! vers l'étoile solitaire, Comme je lèverais les bras! Comme je baiserais la terre, Hélas! Loin de vous, ô morts que je pleure, Des flots noirs j'écoute le glas; Je voudrais fuir, mais je demeure, Hélas! Pourtant le sort, caché dans l'ombre, Se trompe si, comptant mes pas, Il croit que le vieux marcheur sombre Est las. The epic book is the most tragic and terrible of all existing poems of its kind; if indeed we may say that it properly belongs to any kind existing before its advent. The growing horror of the gradual vision of history, from Henri the Fourth to his bloody and gloomy son, from Louis the Thirteenth to the murderer and hangman of the Palatinate and the Cévennes, from Louis the Fourteenth to the inexpressible pollution of incarnate ignominy in his grandson, seems to heave and swell as a sea towards the coming thunder which was to break above the severed head of their miserable son.