Sur les dalles de pierres rare: Ses enfants tués par les dieux. Le souffle expire sur sa bouche, The Christian grief how different in the breast of the Madonna! La douleur chrétienne est immense: Elle est debout sur le Calvaire, Elle participe au Supplice The last of the religious poems I shall mention is the sonnet-sequence in "Sagesse," in form of a dialogue between Christ and the poet. Here the influence of St. Augustine is unmistakable. Christ appears to the poet and commands his love. But he, too deeply abased, dares not aspire to that love which "mounts like flame," and is bitter only to those who love damnation; bright for all. Sauf aux yeux dont un lourd baiser tient la paupière. He holds back and the invitation is repeated. But the sinner who has made evil his good, "qui fait le mal comme sa tâche," still hesitates. A third time, as to Peter, the command is given, with no result. A fourth time it is set forth with endearing promises: Je te ferai goûter sur terre mes prémices, La paix du cœur, l'amour d'être pauvre, et mes soirs Mystiques, quand l'esprit s'ouvre aux calmes espoirs Et croit boire, suivant ma promesse, au Calice Eternel, . . At last, in confusion of joy and grief, hope and fear, the poet responds: Et me voici Hein d'une humble prière, encore qu'un trouble immense Brouille l'espoir que votre voix me révéla, Et j'aspire tremblant. And once more the Gracious Voice is heard: Pauvre âme, c'est cela! Verlaine has ideas, too, for the moral as well as the religious conduct of life. A storm-tossed wanderer himself, he naturally yearns for the virtues that make for peace. He knows next to nothing of altruistic effort, the Socialist's strife: Oui je veux marcher droit et calme dans la Vie Vers le but où le sort dirigera mes pas Sans violence, sans remords, et sans envie. He only wants to "keep straight," as we say, and have "a good time." His ideal of happiness-poor poet of the streets-is a cosy parlor and a pretty mate: Le foyer, la lueur étroite de la lampe, L'heure du thé fumant et des livres fermés, La douceur de sentir la fin de la soirée. And in this mood Verlaine wants no other paradise than to read his verses to the lady, in the parlor, after tea. There is no suggestion of altruism. The lovers are content to be Isolés dans l'amour ainsi qu'en un bois noir. Verlaine now wanders among shadowy forms in a still darker wood! III. ART. If the author of "Sagesse" did not bring much art to bear on the conduct of life, he nevertheless put a great deal into the fabrication of his verse. Matthew Arnold had a theory that the French metrical system is incapable of the finest effects of poetry. It is incapable of the deep poetic sentiment of Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Perhaps a critic is more capable of appreciating the finest nuances of effect in his own language than in another. Certainly, however, there is something over-drilled and mechanical about the stately ordered march of the Alexandrine double file through the pages of French poetry. We miss the breadth, fluidity, flight of the unrhymed English measure. But in France the moderns are showing the variety, movement, melody of which their lyre is capable. And Verlaine excels them all in the beauty of his musical effects, the organ-richness of his vowel-chords, the linked liquidity of his consonants, the sonority of his assonances. many of his lyrics there is a Wagnerian fulness of orchestration, an unfathom In able ground-swell of melody. The soul of the violoncello is in these verses. CHANSON D'AUTOMNE. Les sanglots longs De l'automne Tout suffocant Je me souviens Et je m'en vais Qui m'emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte. De la musique avant toute chose. It is repeated later De la musique encore et toujours! Minor precepts are: to choose l'Impair with its fugitive dissolving effects, void of everything "qui pèse ou pose;" to select your words with easy indifference, for nothing is more enchanting than a tipsy stave, "où l'Indécis au Précis se joint;" to prefer nuance to color and to avoid la Pointe like an assassin; not less, cruel Esprit and impure Laughter "wring the neck of Eloquence. Let Rhyme learn wisdom. Melody always, and again I say, melody. Everything else is literature." Of course the prescription contains dient. Melodious verbiage will never too much of the poet's favorite ingreform a real substitute for poetical sentiment handled with intellectual Newman that it is always necessary strength. Perhaps Verlaine felt with to overstate the case a little when you really want to drive home an idea. The remaining precepts poets will follow on their own responsibility. They may, however, be recommended to avoid la chanson grise, where the words are chosen a little scornfully, and follow the laborious Flaubert in his quest of the one only right word. Herr Nordau attacks the advice which bids us prefer nuance to color: Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor. It places nuance and color in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an ink Melody, with Verlaine, is always the ling, but could not bring to a complete first consideration. We need be in no doubt, for the poet has stated his intention in his literary testament to his favorite disciple, M. Charles Morice. This consists of nine stanzas ambitiously named "Art Poétique." The first line is the important one conception, is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colors, to the full intense color itself. This is a capital instance of the way in which Nordau misses the point, foams at the mouth, and blames an adversary for his own density. Verlaine said, "Not color, but nuance." And what does nuance mean? According to Littré: "Degré d'augmentation ou de diminution que présente une même couleur; différence ou changement des couleurs, surtout dans leur passage d'un ton à un autre." In short, Verlaine was using a concise accurate term, and expressing himself in one word where Nordau requires a paragraph. The meaning is identical; namely, that "nuancées" colors are to be preferred to crude, only the Teuton is wordy and ponderous where the Gaul is epigrammatic and brief. Perhaps it is too figurative an expression to say that Verlaine has added a new string to the French lyre; but at least it cannot be denied that he has made the old ones capable of new effects. True, the vocabulary is limited, and there is a great deal of "rabachage," a great deal of repetition of favorite phrases ard mannerisms. The affectations of the school over which he presided are not entirely absent. Into the vexed sea of symbolist controversy we do not propose to enter, but we may quote, with an eye to Verlaine's defect, M. Stéphane Mallarmé's definition of its aim: To name an object means to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of a poem, i.e., of the happiness which consists in gradually divining it. Our dream should be to suggest the object. The symbol is the perfected use of this mystery, viz., to conjure up an object gradually in order to show the condition of a soul; or, conversely, to choose an object, and out of it to reveal a state of the soul by a series of interpretations. The result of this suggestion-process is that, for a foreigner at any rate, it is sometimes a little difficult to seize the meaning. Puzzle-verses, even nonsense-verses appear, in which the poet seems to be indulging his own caprice at the reader's expense-verses that seem to have more rhyme than reason, and more assonance than common sense. what shall I say of it in the choice of subject? Verlaine is so various, so unexpected and surprising. He will depict one of the great familiar themes, Paris at sunset for example, until you see the towers of Notre Dame darkly expressed on the luminous background, as in an etching by Méryon. Or, passing to the other extreme, he will set the barrel-organ grinding for you until you want to shut your ears to the harsh cacophony, only keeping open eyes for the gutter-ball, surpassing in gravity and precision the march along the smoothest floors to the divinest music. Then the magician shifts the scene, and a whole series of delicately tinted "chromo-lithographs" in Louis Quinze frames is presented to you in metres as dainty as the subject-such tripping, tricksy metres as would have made Racine's wig stand on end. Perhaps there are not many new thoughts, but there are many new pictures, new rendering of old effects, above all new tunes! A train, a "merry-go-round," a steamboat-prosaic, unpromising subjects enough-are made to yield more poetry than anybody before suspected them to contain. Corot landscapes abound-grey-green spaces with their silent pools and nodding poplars. The aristocratic pride of old château-parks, the impish spirit of the harlequinade, the dreaming life of trees, the animation of Paris streets, the Belgium levels dotted with kine, are a few of the subjects Verlaine sets to music. Of such materials he has built a rhyme which cannot perhaps, in Miltonic phrase, be called "lofty," but which has a character and music of its own. AUGUSTUS MANSTON. From Macmillan's Magazine. IN THE HOUR OF DEATH. There is a sound of singing that on the travels road, long, sweet, monotonous; the deep voices of men answering the high, flute-like notes of children, alternating, meeting, and fall I have spoken of the art in treatment; ing apart into silence with a slow, recurrent melancholy. There is the glitter of sunshine upon a silver crucifix, whiteness of fine linen and the pale flicker of candles; there is a black as of mourning that dims even the brightness of the lusty spring; and always the voices rising and falling, long-drawn, sweet, and grave, with the strange remote sadness of a prayer: Oh Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world After the tall silver crucifix follow the little choristers, singing shrilly with the happy indifference of use and childhood, the swing of silver censers, the rhythmical twinkle of a silver bell, the pale, unsteady tapers, and the priests, with the shining of silver wrought into the soft blackness of a velvet cope. There are many that follow after, and some of them weep; they follow, but at a little distance, and between them and the priests there is a stretch of sunlit road, where the spring sunshine makes a riotous glory, and where there is one that walks alone. The singers go before with taper and bell and the pale swaying crucifix; the mourners follow weeping as for one dead. But there is no coffin; only, on the bare patch of road, alone in the midst of the sunshine and the sweet strong spring air, one that walks alone. It is a funeral on its way to the church, the saddest and strangest in the world; the funeral, as it used to be in Brittany, of a leper. The scourge had been found upon him and there was no escape; he must rise and be driven forth, and his place would know him no more. He had sat waiting for the end, looking dully from wife to child, with eyes that had already grown lustreless and dim; there would be time enough afterwards to weep, if lepers remembered how to weep. He could not rebel, he could not escape, there was not anywhere any hope; there was nothing to be said or done but to wait, only to wait till they came to take him away. His wife wept, and he watched her with a curious remote speculation; soon, very soon, when he was out of sight, her tears would be dried. She would laugh again presently, when he was dead and put away; and he, he would not be so dead, leper as he was, but he would hear her voice when he passed and yearn for her, or curse her. Already he almost hated her for her clean health; and a cruel pleasure swept through him at the thought that perhaps, since she had been constantly with him- Only, when he was dead, he would not care; he would hear many feet running to avoid his path, and he would not know which were the feet of his children; and when his wife laughed, it would be no more to him than a sound, like other sounds; he would not know, or care. Dead men did not feel; and already the sting was surely not so very bitter. There was nothing to do but to sit and wait, and to watch his wife and his young children; they wept, but they sat at the far side by the window, and they left him alone. It would not be long now before those came that were to put him outside of life. And presently the priests and the choristers, with the strong smell of incense and the shining crucifix, had paused upon his doorstep, the doorstep which had been his in the days of his living; and he had looked at them, with a vague indifferent pleasure in the sight, and an impersonal interest in the matter which seemed very slightly to concern him. It was a fine funeral, with the great silver crucifix, and the glitter of silver on black, and the flickering tapers; it was a funeral such as one gave only to persons of position. The villagers were content with much less, when they had to pay for it; but it was the Church that buried the lepers. He had seen such funerals before, and he had followed in the crowd, well behind, with a careful eye upon the way of the wind. He had never thought very much about the one that walked after the priests, alone. Holy water was sprinkled upon the threshold, and a blessing laid upon the house; and he was then bidden to unclothe himself and to put on a black gown that the priest had brought, for he might carry nothing away with him into death; all that he possessed must | black-draped also; but there is no be left behind. Perhaps he faltered for a moment in departing, and looked back; he was already no more than a dead man, but this had been his home, and his wife and children were there, weeping. He looked back; but they sat at the far side, with a breadth of air between them, and he was alone. Henceforward he would always be alone. The crucifix and the silver bell led the way, glittering and twinkling. The choristers swung their censers, and the tapers flickered in the wind; and the priest's voice spread out sonorously to meet the answering trebles, in long slow cadences: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. The sun is high and the sky pale and clear with the infinite distances of spring; the hedges are flushed with the purple of the swollen sap-filled branches, and pearled already with a multitude of small buds. There is here and there blossom, milk-white and frosted, or the faint green of young leaves; the bank beneath breaks into the yellow of primroses or tall, slender daffodils, and the air is sharp with a fine wild fragrance of gorse bloom and new growth and fresh-turned earth. The world is lusty and full-blooded and superbly alive; it is only he that walks between the black-coped priest and the lagging crowd, only he that walks alone, that is dead. The high sky and the sunlight upon the sea, the blue distance and the swell of field and orchard he is to look upon no more; for him, after to-day, there will be nothing in all the world but the spot of ground beneath his feet. He may not raise his eyes from that earth to which, as a dead man, the Church has returned him, and of which the law makes him part. He will be presently no more than dust; from this life, that presses so beautifully about him, he is henceforward to be shut out. In the church all is made ready for a funeral mass. The chancel is hung with black, and in the choir the tressels on which the coffin should stand are coffin; there is only, between them, a black mat on which kneels a man in a black gown. On either side, at head and foot, are set the tall funeral tapers,' with their quaint sombre placards of skull and cross-bones; the crucifix is reared in the face of the altar; there is solemn chanting, and behind the church is full of peasants, the women with their great white-winged coiffes loosened and hanging upon their shoulders in sign of mourning. All is in its usual place and order; only there is no coffin, but one that kneels, listening and looking confusedly, dully. There will be time enough to-morrow to think and weep, if lepers do either. The service comes to its end; and now the dead man must be taken to his tomb. Once more they set out in the same order; once more they pass, led by the crucifix, the tinkling bell, and the swinging censers, out of the church, into which the leper, alive or dead, will never again enter. And between the priest and the lagging crowd is still the bare space where one walks alone. The sun shines brightly along the road to the village, but now they turn aside till they come to a hut upon the edge of the wood; it is a poor hut, a leper's hut, and they pause a little way off; there is danger in the air, and one need not go too close. The people huddle in a mass up the wind; only the priest goes forward even to the threshold, where he throws down the little property that a leper may possess. There is the black gown, with the huge black hood and the terrible red cross upon the shoulder; there are the staff, and the rope-girdle with its bell, from the sound of which all men fly, the sack to hold his food, the blanket which is all his bedding. And then he reads the commands, which the leper, on pain of death, must constantly obey: never to leave his hut save with his hood drawn down so that none may see his face; without his girdle with its belt, that at its sound all may avoid him; without his staff, that if he need food he may point to it, or his sack that it |