anarchy. In a case of this pressing danger, this mortal peril, it is not every man who would have put himself forward at such risk to protect against a force so formidable the threatened safety of society; not even the native land of these lion-hearted men can hope always to reproduce a breed of patriots ready to incur such hazards and undertake such feats as this in the sacred cause of their country. France has her Bayards and her Dantons, England her Sidneys and her Nelsons; these are but common heroes, fit only to be classed with the heroes and patriots of old time, and such as their native soil might haply rear again at need; but the most ardent and sanguine lover of his country in all Belgium can hardly hope that his fatherland will ever again bring forth a race of men worthy to be called the seed of such fathers as these; men capable of exploits unexampled in the annals of vulgar patriotism, and from which the bravest of those above cited would assuredly have drawn back. It is hard to imagine those heroes of other countries inspired with the courage requisite to make war upon such enemies and under such conditions as could not suffice to daunt or divert from their purpose the heroes of Brussels.

Thus, as once before from Jersey, was Victor Hugo now driven from Belgium by a government which in the year of general shame contrived to attain the supreme crown of disgrace, to gather the final flower of ignominy; a distinction not easy to win from so many rivals in the infamous race; but theft and murder, under their magnified and multiplied forms of national robbery and civic massacre, are too common among a certain sort of

conquerors to be marked out for such especial notice as an act of this singular and admirable baseness. From all unclean things, from the mouths of the priesthood and the press, from the tongues that lap blood and the throats that vomit falsehood, rose the cry of mockery and hatred ; if the preacher of peace and righteousness, the counsellor of justice and of mercy, were not a madman, he would be a ruffian; but the punctilious equity of episcopal journals gave him the benefit of the doubt. Yet for all this, as the poet found on leaving Brussels, it is not everybody who can impose the doom of exile; to expulsion the foreigner may condemn you, to exile he cannot. Exile is from the fatherland alone; a man's own country is the only one terrible to him who is cast out from it. In words full of the beauty of a divine sorrow the exile of many years has set down the difference.

From Vianden as from Brussels he continued to fulfil the duty of intercessor; to plead for the incendiary who could not read, for the terrible and pitiable woman dragged in triumph through the laughing and raging throngs of Versailles, dumb and bleeding, with foamflecked lips fast locked in bitterness of silence, in savage deafness that nothing can move or shake, with the look as of one aweary of the sun," with a kind of fierce affright in her eyes. For all such his appeal is made to their slayers on the old sacred plea, "Forgive them; for they know not what they do." Their wretchedness and their ignorance, their great want and their little knowledge, left them conscious of all that they suffered, unconscious of all that they did.

Out of the darkness of these most tragic poems of all,

one stands up with the light of a great deed on it, relieved against the rest in a glory as of sunrise. It is the poem which places on everlasting record the heroism of a child of twelve, condemned to be shot after all his companions, who asked leave to go first and take his watch home to his mother, promising to come back in time to die in his turn. They let him go, laughing at the infantine shallowness of the pretence; the little blackguard was afraid; off with you! He went, and returned. Even the soldiers of Thiers and Galifet could not slaughter that boy; the officer in command gave him his life, and the master-poet of his nation has given him immortality. The verses in which the greater of these two gifts is bestowed come like a draught of wine to the lips of one sick and faint amid all the pitiful and fearful record of evil inflicted and endured; they refresh, rekindle, reilluminate the sunken spirit with a flush and thrill of high delight.

But it is possible to meet death with another kind of fearlessness than this, a quality which is not of the light but of the darkness; not with divine defiance as a hero, but with desperate indifference as a slave: nor is any society sound or any state secure which has found out no way to cure this dismal readiness to be killed off, this grim facility in dying. Upon all these to whom we have made life so hard that old men and children alike are ready to leave it without a word or tear, in tragic disdain, as of men strangers to their own death, whose grave was long since ready dug in their heart; upon all to whom we have refused the right of the body to its meat and the right of the spirit to its food, to whom we have given

neither bread nor light, corporeal nurture nor intellectual; upon the slaughtered and the banished, the hideous pits of quicklime into which the yet warm corpses of men and women were huddled, and the more hideous ships of transport between whose decks were huddled the living agonies of those condemned to the sufferings over which in the first years of the fallen empire men shuddered or wept, thinking of the innocent as well as the guilty lives crushed and worn out in that penal passage, killed by cold and heat and foul wretchedness-stifled in dens too low to stand upright in, with the sense overhead of the moving mass of the huge hurrying ship on its intolerable way; upon all these multitudinous miseries of all who do and suffer wrong, the single voice of charity and of reason invokes the equal dole and due of pity. At Vianden, amid all the sounds and shows of summer, the banished poet broods on the bloody problem that is not to be solved by file-firing and massacre at haphazard; all the light of the June days is reflected in his verse, but in his soul there is no reflection but of graves dug in the street for men shot down without trial, of murder feeling its way in the dark at random, and victims dispatched by chance instead of choice. With the intense and subtle beauty of this June landscape, where the witness could see no sympathy with the human trouble of the time, we may compare that former picture of the grim glory of a November sky after sunset, seen from the invested walls of Paris, when heaven did seem in harmony with the time, and the watcher saw there a reflection of war and mourning, from the west as white as a shroud to the east as black as a pall and alon the line of

D

horizon the likeness of a blood-red sword let fall from the hand of a god after some battle with a giant of equal

stature.

For all this, notwithstanding, the watchword of the poem is hope, and not despair. "All this horror has hope in it; the ice-cold morning chills the sky-line as with fear; at times the day begins with such a shudder that the rising sun seems a masked attack.-The coming wave of the unknown has but a dull and livid transparence, into which the light comes but by degrees; what it shows us, seems to float and drift in folds immeasurable. The expansion of form and number appals us, and it is horrible to see to-day in the darkness what ought only to be seen to-morrow." By the parable of the robin's nest found in the hollow of the brazen mouth of the Waterloo lion, we are bidden see and hear the future in the womb of the present, hope in the jaws of despair, the song of peace in the very throat of war. Thus it is but natural that the poet should hearken rather to the higher voice than to the voice of expediency, to the counsellor whose name is Reason, whose forename is Interest; to the friendly admonition which reminds him that truth which is over true is all but falsehood; that in seeking the ideal you find the visionary, and become a dreamer through being too much a thinker; that the wise man does not wish to be unjust, but fears on the other hand to be too just, and seeks a middle course between falsehood, which is the first danger, and truth, which is the second; that Right in the rough is merely the ore from which in its crude state we have to extract the pure gold of Law; that too much light is as sure to blind you