But of all echoes and of all responses which reverberate from end to end of these three great sections of song, the very sweetest, and perhaps the very deepest, are those evoked by love of little children, and compassionate reverence for the poor. If but one division were to be left us out of all the second series, and fate or chance, comparatively compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our choice which this one should be, the best judgments might perhaps decide to preserve the twenty-third at all events. What the words "realism" and "naturalism" do naturally and really signify in matters of art, the blatant babblers who use them to signify the photography of all things abject might learn, if shallow insolence and unclean egotism were suddenly made capable of learning, by the study of only the two poems which set before us in two different forms the strength of weakness in the child whose love redeems his father from death, and the child who can find no comfort but in death for the lack of a father's love. There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of sweetness. Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind. This influence could not naturally but combine with the lifelong influence of all noble sympathies to attract his admiration and his pity towards the poor folk of the shore, and to produce from that sense of compassion for obscurer sorrows and brotherhood with humbler heroism than his own such work as the poem which describes the charity of a fisherman's wife towards the children of her dead neighbor. It has all the beautiful precision and accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervor of pathetic and imaginative emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle.