Page:Studyofvictorhug00swin.djvu/16

 were here made nobly manifest: his originality and ardour of imagination, wild as yet and crude and violent, found vent two years later in Han d'Islande. But no boyish work on record ever showed more singular force of hand, more brilliant variety of power: though the author's criticism ten years later admits that 'il n'y a dans Han d'Islande qu'une chose sentie, l'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose observée, l'amour de la jeune fille.' But as the work of a boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there with genuine humour, terror, and pathos, it is not less wonderful than are the author's first odes for ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in traditions of daring, is evident whenever an episode of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it isin the ballads written between his twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo first showed himself, beyond all question and above all cavil, an original and a great poet. La Chasse du Burgrave and Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean would suffice of themselves to establish that. The fire, the music, the force, the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious little poems must needs, one would think, impresimpress [sic] even such readers as might be impervious to the charm of their exquisitely vigorous and dexterous execution. Take for example this one stanza from the ballad last mentioned:—

La cohue, Flot de fer, Frappe, hue, Remplit l'air,