Page:Studyofvictorhug00swin.djvu/159

 wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the Olympian of old—

Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté, L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère, Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre:

and now more than ever would the verses that follow befit the lips of their author, if speaking in his own person:—

Mon crâne plein d'échos, plein de lueurs, plein d'yeux, Est l'antre éblouissant du grand Pan radieux; En me voyant on croit entendre le murmure De la ville habitée et de la moisson mûre, Le bruit du gouffre au chant de l'azur réuni, L'onde sur l'océan, le vent dans l'infini, Et le frémissement des deux ailes du cygne.

It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we speak of the dead; when Victor Hugo has joined the company of his equals, but apparently not till then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of all the gifts we have received from him with less than love that deepens into worship, than worship that brightens into love. Meantime it is only in the phrase of one of his own kindred, poet and exile and