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 Son bras aux deux dressé Ferme le noir passé Et les portes de fer Du sombre enfer.

C'est l'ange de Dieu. Dans le ciel bleu Son aile immense Couvre avec fierté L'humanité. Son nom est France Ou Liberté!

The Caravan, a magnificent picture, is also a magnificent allegory and a magnificent hymn. The poem following sums up in twenty-six lines a whole world of terror and of tempest hurtling and wailing round the wreck of a boat by night. It is followed by a superb appeal against the infliction of death on rascals whose reptile blood would dishonour and defile the scaffold: and this again by an admonition to their chief not to put his trust in the chance of a high place of infamy among the more genuinely imperial hellhounds of historic record. The next poem gives us in perfect and exquisite summary the opinions of a contemporary conservative on a dangerous anarchist of extravagant opinions and disreputable character, whom for example's sake it was at length found necessary to crucify. There is no song more simply and nobly pitiful than that which tells us in its burden how a man may die for lack of his native country as naturally and inevitably as for lack of his daily bread. I cite only the last three stanzas by way of sample.

Les exilés: s'en vont pensifs. Leur âme, hélas! n'est plus entière. Ils regardent l'ombre des ifs