devenant plus triste_,"--to be happy in becoming sadder. The poet, who till now had clung to the conviction that there can be no happy fate, that all our destinies are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary persuades us to consider how even calamity may be refined in the medium of wisdom in such fashion as to become an asset of life, and warns us against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of our fortunes. He holds that blows and sorrows cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save those we supply, and "wise is he for whom even the evil must feed the pyre of love." In fine, Fate obeys him who dares to command it. After all, then, man has a right to appoint himself the captain of his soul, the master of his fate. Yet, for all that, the author of "Wisdom and Destiny" should not be regarded as the partizan and apologist of sadness for the sake of wisdom. If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by far the richer mine. This new outlook becomes more and more optimistic because of the increasing faculty of such a philosophy to extract from the mixed offerings of life a more near-at-hand happiness than sufferings can possibly afford; not perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over the comicality of the passing spectacle which with so many passes for a "sense of humor," but rather a calm and serious realization of what is lastingly beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment of this beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of helping others to rise to a similar exalted level of existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to discharge by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete reality of happiness. _L'Oiseau Bleu_ ("The Blue Bird"), above all other works, illustrates the fact that human lives suffer not so much for the lack of happiness as for the want of being clearly conscious of the happiness they possess. It is seen that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at last triumphantly shot forth through the overlaying fatalism. The newly converted, hence all the more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel and consolation can come only from those who trust in the regenerative power of hope, throws himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the Christian Scientist, and confidently proceeds to cure the ills of human kind by a categorical denial of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more just to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the serenity of which even the frightful experience of the present time has failed to destroy, that instead of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies its supremacy. All about him he perceives in the midst of the worst wrongs and evils many fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to distil its own antitoxin.