the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play variations in the same key. But the _Old Man's Idyl_ which closes the book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and cunning of hand, than any of these. In "the voice of a child a year old" there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of _L'Art d'être Grand-père_, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter; and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age. L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort; Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles. _Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles._ La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur, Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire. A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows: L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse; Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce, Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons. Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses: Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit, La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles, Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes; La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends, Et tâche de parler aussi bien. It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that "altar of Righteousness" where Æschylus was wont to worship. The twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or completion of the work undertaken in the immortal _Châtiments._ Even in that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as _La Colère du Bronze_, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and the splendor of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close, Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?