“The child’s murmuring is more and is less than words; there are no notes, and yet it is a song; there are no syllables, and yet it is a language....  This poor stammering is a compound of what the child said when it was an angel, and of what it will say when it becomes a man.  The cradle has a Yesterday as the grave has a Morrow; the Morrow and the Yesterday mingle in that strange cooing their twofold mystery....”

“Her lips smiled, her eyes smiled, the dimples in her cheeks smiled.  There came forth in this smile a mysterious welcome of the morning.  The soul has faith in the ray.  The heavens were blue, warm was the air.  The fragile creature, without knowing anything, or recognising anything, or understanding anything, softly floating in musings which are not thought, felt itself in safety in the midst of nature, among those good trees and that guileless greenery, in the pure and peaceful landscape, amid the rustle of nests, of flowing springs, of insects, of leaves, while over all there glowed the great innocency of the sun” (ii. 104).

As an eminent man has recently written about Wordsworth’s most famous Ode, there may be some bad philosophy here, but there is assuredly some noble and touching poetry.

If the carelessness of infancy is caught with this perfection of finish, there is a tragic companion piece in the horror and gnawing anguish of the wretched woman from whom her young have been taken—­her rescue from death, her fierce yearnings for them like the yearnings of a beast, her brute-like heedlessness of her life and her body in the cruel search.

And so the poet conducts us along the strange excursive windings of the life and passion of humanity.  The same hand which draws such noble figures as Gauvain—­and the real Lanjuinais of history was fully as heroic and as noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction—­is equally skilful in drawing the wild Breton beggar who dwells underground among the branching tree-roots; and the monstrous Imanus, the barbarous retainer of the Lord of the Seven Forests; and Radoub, the serjeant from Paris, a man of hearty oaths, hideous, heroic, humoursome, of a bloody ingenuity in combat.  And the same hand which described the silent sundown on the sandy shore of the bay, and the mysterious darkness of the forests, and the blameless play of the little ones, gives us the prodigious animation of the night surprise at Dol, the furious conflict at La Tourgue, and, perhaps most powerful of all, the breaking loose of the gun on the deck of the Claymore.  You may say that this is only melodrama; but if we turn to the actual events of ’93, the melodrama of the romancer will seem tame compared with the melodrama of the faithful chronicler.  And so long as the narrative of melodramatic action is filled with poetry and beauty, there is no reproach in uncommon situation, in intense passion, in magnanimous or subtle motives that are not of every day.  Of Hugo’s art we may say what Dr. Newman has said of something else:  Such work is always open to criticism and it is always above it.