“On doute
  La nuit—­
  J’ecoute
  Tout fuit,
  Tout passe: 
  L’espace
  Efface
  Le bruit.” [20]

But the earlier volume of “Odes et Ballades” (1826) offers many instances of metrical experiments hardly less ingenious.  In “La Chasse du Burgrave” every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound but different in sense: 

  “Il part, et Madame Isabelle,
          Belle,
  Dit gaiement du haut des remparts: 
          ‘Pars!’
  Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine,
          Pleine
  D’ardents seigneurs, de senechaux
          Chauds.”

The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo’s verses of the queer, abrupt, and outre measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning.  Compare with the above, e.g., his “Love among the Ruins.”

  “Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles
        Miles and miles
  On the solitary pastures where our sheep,
        Half asleep,” etc.

From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the native literary tradition, there result several interesting peculiarities.  The first of these is that the new French school, instead of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern writers of England and Germany.  This may seem strange when we reflect that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh century down to the very popular court allegory, the “Roman de la Rose”, in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of chronicles, chansons de geste, romans d’aventures, fabliaux, lais, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, jeuspartis, pastourelles, ballades—­of all the literary forms in fact which were then cultivated.  Nor was this mass of work entirely without influence on the romanticists of 1830.  Theophile Dondey, wrote a poem on Roland, and Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naivete and truly national character.  Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers—­to Ronsard and “The Pleiade.”  Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and publication of mediaeval remains.  But in general the innovating school sought their inspiration in foreign literatures.  Antony Deschamps translated the “Inferno”; Alfred de Vigny translated “Othello” as the “Moor of Venice” (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21] and a novel, “Cinq Mars,” which is the nearest thing in French literature to the historical