of Greece any more than in Confucius.  It is not in Cicero, nor in Aristotle, nor even in Socrates any more than in the modern Franklin.  The principle of inspiration is different, if indeed it be not opposite:  the paths may come together for a moment, but they cross one another.  And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source.”

Of M. Sainte-Beuve’s delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page.  “Poetry,” says he, “is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of color.  The task of poetry is not to say everything, but to make us dream everything.”  And he cites a similar judgment of Fenelon:  “The poet should take only the flower of each object, and never touch but what can be beautified.”  In a critique of Alfred de Musset he speaks of the youthful poems of Milton:  “‘Il Penseroso’ is the masterpiece of meditative and contemplative poetry; it is like a magnificent oratorio in which prayer ascends slowly toward the Eternal.  I make no comparison; let us never take august names from their sphere.  All that is beautiful in Milton stands by itself; one feels the tranquil habit of the upper regions, and continuity in power.”  In a paper on the letters of Ducis, he proves that he apprehends the proportions of Shakespeare.  He asks:  “Have we then got him at last?  Is our stomach up to him?  Are we strong enough to digest this marrow of lion (cette moelle de lion)?” And again, in an article on the men of the eighteenth century, he writes:  “One may be born a sailor, but there is nothing for it like seeing a storm, nor for a soldier like seeing a battle.  A Shakespeare, you will say, very nearly did without all that, and yet he knew it all.  But Nature never but once made a Shakespeare.”

Like most writers, of whatever country, M. Sainte-Beuve has formed himself on native models, and the French having no poet of the highest class, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe, it is a further proof of his breadth and insight that he should so highly value the treasures in the deeper mines opened by these foreigners.  Seeing, too, how catholic he is, and liberal toward all other greatness, one even takes pleasure in his occasional exuberance of national complacency.  Whenever he speaks of Montaigne or La Fontaine or Moliere, his words flame with a tempered enthusiasm.  But he throws no dust in his own eyes:  his is a healthy rapture, a torch lighted by the feelings, but which the reason holds upright and steady.  His native favorites he enjoys as no Englishman or German could, but he does not overrate them.  Nor does he overrate