the author of "Hamlet" "panders to the mob." Let it be so. The poet "panders to the mob." If anything is great, it is that. There in the foreground, everywhere, in full light, amidst the flourish of trumpets, are the powerful men followed by the gilded men. The poet does not see them, or, if he does, he disdains them. He lifts his eyes and looks at God; then he lowers his eyes and looks at the people. There in the depth of the shadow, nearly invisible, so much submerged that it is the night, is that fatal crowd, that vast and mournful heap of suffering, that venerable populace of the tattered and of the ignorant,--chaos of souls. That crowd of heads undulates obscurely like the waves of a nocturnal sea. From time to time there pass on that surface, like squalls over the water, catastrophes,--a war, a pestilence, a royal favourite, a famine. That causes a disturbance which lasts a short time, the depth of sorrow being immovable as the depth of the ocean. Despair deposits in us some weight as of lead. The last word of the abyss is stupor; therefore it is the night. It is, under the thick blackness, behind which all is indistinct, the mournful sea of the needy. These overloaded beings are silent; they know nothing; they submit _Plectuntur Achivi._ They are hungry and cold. Their indecent flesh is seen through the holes in their tatters. Who makes those tatters? The purple. The nakedness of virgins comes from the nudity of odalisques. From the twisted rags of the daughters of the people fall pearls for the Fontanges and the Châteauroux. It is famine which gilds Versailles. The whole of that living and dying shadow moves; these larvæ are in the pangs of death; the mother's breast is dry; the father has no work; the brains have no light. If there is a book in that destitution, it resembles the pitcher, so insipid or corrupt is what it offers to the thirst of intellects. Mournful families! The group of the little ones is wan. All die away and creep along, not having even the power to love; and unknown to them perhaps, while they crouch down and resign themselves, from all that vast unconsciousness in which Right dwells, from the rumbling murmur of those wretched breaths mingled together, proceeds an indescribable confused voice, mysterious mist of language, succeeding, syllable by syllable in the darkness, in uttering extraordinary words,--Future, Humanity, Liberty, Equality, Progress. And the poet listens, and he hears; and he looks, and he sees; and he bends lower and lower, and he weeps; and all at once, growing with a strange growth, drawing from all that darkness his own transfiguration, he stands erect, terrible and tender, above all those wretched ones,--those above as well as those below,--with flaming eyes.