Page:Studyofvictorhug00swin.djvu/77

 La rumeur des vivants s'éteint diminuée. Tout ce que j'ai rêvé s'est envolé, nuée! Sur mes jours devenus fantômes, pâle et seul, Je regarde tomber l'infini, ce linceul.— Et vous dites:—Après?—Sous un mont qui surplombe, Près des flots, j'ai marqué la place de ma tombe; Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend; Tout est horreur et nuit—Après?—Je suis content.

The verses addressed to friends whose love and reverence had not forsaken the exile—to Jules Janin, to Alexandre Dumas, above all to Paul Meurice—are models of stately grace in their utterance of serene and sublime resignation, of loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those addressed to the sharers of his exile—to his wife, to his children, to their friend—have yet a deeper spiritual music in the sweet and severe perfection of their solemn cadence. I have but time to name with a word of homage in passing the famous and faultless little poem Aux Feuillantines, fragrant with the memory and musical as the laugh of childhood; the memorial verses recurring here and there, with such infinite and subtle variations on the same deep theme of mourning or of sympathy; the great brief studies of lonely landscape, imbued with such grave radiance and such noble melancholy, or kindled with the motion and quickened by the music of the sea: but two poems at all events I must select for more especial tribute of more thankful recognition: the sublime and wonderful vision of the angel who was neither life nor death, but love, more strong than either; and the all but sublimer allegory couched in verse of such majestic resonance, which shows us the star of Venus in heaven above the ruin of her island on earth. The former and shorter of these is as excellent an example as could be