again some actual prospect where the eye procures for the inner sense a dream of beauty and the incommensurable.  Perhaps the palm for exquisite workmanship will be popularly given, and justly given, to the episode humorously headed The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, at the opening of the third volume.  It is the story of three little children, barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, wondering, slumbering, in solitude through a summer day in an old tower.  As a rule the attempt to make infancy interesting in literature ends in maudlin failure.  But at length the painters have found an equal, or more than an equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less easily than colour and form to the reproduction of the beauty and life of childhood.  In his poetry Victor Hugo had already shown his passing sensibility to the pathos of the beginnings of our life; witness such pieces as Chose vue un Jour de Printemps, Les Pauvres Gens, the well-known pieces in L’Annee Terrible, and a hundred other lively touches and fragments of finished loveliness and penetrating sympathy.  In prose it is a more difficult feat to collect the trivial details which make up the life of the tiny human animal into a whole that shall be impressive, finished, and beautiful.  And prose can only describe by details enumerated one by one.  This most arduous feat is accomplished in the children’s summer day in the tower, and with enchanting success.  Intensely realistic, yet the picture overflows with emotion—­not the emotion of the mother, but of the poet.  There is infinite tenderness, pathos, love, but all heightened at once and strengthened by the self-control of masculine force.  A man writing about little ones seems able to place himself outside, and thus to gain more calmness and freedom of vision than the more passionate interest or yearning of women permits to them in this field of art.  Not a detail is spared, yet the whole is full of delight and pity and humour.  Only one lyric passage is allowed to poetise and accentuate the realism of the description.  Georgette, some twenty months old, scrambles from her cradle and prattles to the sunbeam.

“What a bird says in its song, a child says in its prattle.  ’Tis the same hymn; a hymn indistinct, lisping, profound.  The child has what the bird has not, the sombre human destiny in front of it.  Hence the sadness of men as they listen, mingling with the joy of the little one as it sings.  The sublimest canticle to be heard on earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy.  That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant?  This ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless being.  Ill, if it shall come, will be an