Did his mind, obsessed and overwhelmed by images of death, crave at last for the one thing stranger than all these—­the experience of it?  It is easy to believe so, and that, ill, wretched, and abandoned by Degen at the miserable Cigogne Hotel, he should seek relief in the gradual dissolution which attends upon loss of blood.  And then, when he had recovered, when he was almost happy once again, the old thoughts, perhaps, came crowding back upon him—­thoughts of the futility of life, and the supremacy of death and the mystical whirlpool of the unknown, and the long quietude of the grave.  In the end, Death had grown to be something more than Death to him—­it was, mysteriously and transcendentally, Love as well.

    Death’s darts are sometimes Love’s.  So Nature tells,
    When laughing waters close o’er drowning men;
    When in flowers’ honied corners poison dwells;
    When Beauty dies:  and the unwearied ken
    Of those who seek a cure for long despair
    Will learn ...

What learning was it that rewarded him?  What ghostly knowledge of eternal love?

    If there are ghosts to raise,
      What shall I call,
    Out of hell’s murky haze,
      Heaven’s blue pall? 
    —­Raise my loved long-lost boy
    To lead me to his joy.—­
      There are no ghosts to raise;
      Out of death lead no ways;
        Vain is the call.

    —­Know’st thou not ghosts to sue? 
      No love thou hast. 
    Else lie, as I will do,
      And breathe thy last. 
    So out of Life’s fresh crown
    Fall like a rose-leaf down. 
      Thus are the ghosts to woo;
      Thus are all dreams made true,
        Ever to last!

1907.

HENRI BEYLE

In the whole of French literature it would be difficult to point to a figure at once so important, so remarkable, and so little known to English readers as Henri Beyle.  Most of us are, no doubt, fairly familiar with his pseudonym of ‘Stendhal’; some of us have read Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme; but how many of us have any further knowledge of a man whose works are at the present moment appearing in Paris in all the pomp of an elaborate and complete edition, every scrap of whose manuscripts is being collected and deciphered with enthusiastic care, and in honour of whose genius the literary periodicals of the hour are filling entire numbers with exegesis and appreciation?  The eminent critic, M. Andre Gide, when asked lately to name the novel which stands in his opinion first among the novels of France, declared that since, without a doubt, the place belongs to one or other of the novels of Stendhal, his only difficulty was in making his choice among these; and he finally decided upon La Chartreuse de Parme.  According to this high authority, Henri Beyle was indisputably the creator of the greatest work of fiction in the