But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendor of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this-- Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait-- there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance. Avec de l'équité condensée en airain. But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:-- Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur. From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived--a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus--the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the _Légende des Siècles_ ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light--"le reste effrayant de Babel"--a palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:-- Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent, De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent, La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau. But over and within this book-- traduit Du passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit--