of perfect astonishment. The midsummer rains had kept up the waters which the melting snow in the Jura had previously swollen. The space between the lake and the Thiele was almost entirely flooded; the highest spots formed islands of pasture amidst the expanse of waters ruffled with the fresh breeze of morning. The waves of the lake could be made out in the distance, driven by the wind against the half-flooded bank. Some goats and cows, with their herdsman, who made a rustic music with a horn, were passing at the moment over a tongue of 10 land left dry between the flooded plain and the Thiele. Stones set in the parts where it was worst going supported this natural causeway or filled up gaps in it; the pasture to which the docile animals were proceeding was not in sight, and to see their slow and irresolute advance, one would have said they were about to get out into the lake and be lost there. The heights of Anet and the thick woods of Julemont rose out of the waters like a desert island without an inhabitant. The hilly chain of Vuilly edged the lake on the horizon. To the south, this chain 20 stretched away behind the slopes of Montmirail; and farther on than all these objects, sixty leagues of eternal snows stamped the whole country with the inimitable majesty of those bold lines of nature which give to places sublimity.'

He dines at the toll-house by the river-bank, and after passing the afternoon there, goes out again late in the evening :

The moon had not yet risen; my path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. I had taken the key of my 30 lodging that I might come in when I liked without being tied to a particular hour. But feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I left it at a little village called Marin, which has the lake to the south of it. I descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The air was calm; not a sail was to be seen on the lake. Every one was at rest; some in the forgetfulness of their toils, others in the forgetfulness of 40 their sorrows. The moon rose; I remained there hours.

Towards morning, the moon shed over earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the washing of the waves upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.

Sensibility which no words can express, charm and torment of our vain years! vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impene10 trable! all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment, everything that a mortal heart can contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all, I experienced it all, in this memorable night. I have made an ominous step towards the age of decline; I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the simple, whose heart is always young!'

There, in one of the hours which were at once the inspiration and the enervation of Senancour's life, we leave him. It is possible that an age, breaking with the 20 past, and inclined to tell it the most naked truths, may take more pleasure than its predecessors in Obermann's bleak frankness, and may even give him a kind of celebrity. Nevertheless it may be predicted with certainty that his very celebrity, if he gets it, will have, like his life, something maimed, incomplete, and unsuccessful about it; and that his intimate friends will still be but a few, as they have hitherto been. These few will never fail him.

SAINTE-BEUVE

[The Academy, November 13, 1869.]

THIS is neither the time nor the place to attempt any complete account of the remarkable man whose pen, busy to the end, and to the end charming and instructing us, has within the last few weeks dropped from his hand for ever. A few words are all that the occasion allows, and it is hard not to make them words of mere regret and eulogy. Most of what is at this moment written about him is in this strain, and very naturally; the world has some arrears to make up to him, and now, if ever, it feels this. Late, and as it were by accident, he came to his due estimation 10 in France; here in England it is only within the last ten years that he can be said to have been publicly known at all. We who write these lines knew him long and owed him much; something of that debt we will endeavour to pay, not, as we ourselves might be most inclined, by following the impulse of the hour and simply praising him, but, as he himself would have preferred, by recalling what in sum he chiefly was, and what is the essential scope of his effort and working.

Shortly before Sainte-Beuve's death appeared a new 20 edition of his Portraits Contemporains, one of his earlier works, of which the contents date from 1832 and 1833, before his method and manner of criticism were finally formed. But the new edition is enriched with notes and retouches added as the volumes were going through the press, and which bring our communications with him down to these very latest months of his life. Among them is a comment on a letter of Madame George Sand, in which she had spoken of the admiration excited by one of his articles. I leave this as it stands,' says he, because the 30 sense and the connection of the passage require it; but, personne ne sait mieux que moi à quoi s'en tenir sur le mérite absolu de ces articles qui sont tout au plus, et même

lorsqu'ils réussissent le mieux, des choses sensées dans un genre médiocre. Ce qu'ils ont eu d'alerte et d'à-propos à leur moment suffit à peine à expliquer ces exagérations de l'amitié. Réservons l'admiration pour les œuvres de poésie et d'art, pour les compositions élevées; la plus grande gloire du critique est dans l'approbation et dans l'estime des bons esprits.'

This comment, which extends to his whole work as a critic, has all the good breeding and delicacy by which 10 Sainte-Beuve's writing was distinguished, and it expresses, too, what was to a great extent, no doubt, his sincere conviction. Like so many who have tried their hands at œuvres de poésie et d'art, his preference, his dream, his ideal, was there; the rest was comparatively journeymanwork, to be done well and estimably rather than ill and discreditably, and with precious rewards of its own, besides, in exercising the faculties and in keeping off ennui; but still work of an inferior order. Yet when one looks at the names on the title-page of the Portraits Contemporains : 20 Chateaubriand, Béranger, Lamennais, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, George Sand,-names representing, in our judgment, very different degrees of eminence, but none of which we have the least inclination to disparage,—is it certain that the works of poetry and art to which these names are attached eclipse the work done by SainteBeuve? Could Sainte-Beuve have had what was no doubt his will, and in the line of the Consolations and Volupté have produced works with the power and vogue of Lamartine's works, or Chateaubriand's, or Hugo's, would he have 30 been more interesting to us to-day, would he have stood permanently higher ? We venture to doubt it. Works of poetry and art like Molière's and Milton's eclipse no doubt all productions of the order of the Causeries du Lundi, and the highest language of admiration may very properly be reserved for such works alone. Inferior works in the same kind have their moment of vogue when their admirers apply to them this language; there is a moment when a drama of Hugo's finds a public to speak of it as if it were Molière's, and a poem of Lamartine's finds 40 a public to speak of it as if it were Milton's. At no moment will a public be found to speak of work like Sainte-Beuve's

Causeries in such fashion; and if this alone were regarded, one might allow oneself to leave to his work the humbler rank which he assigns to it. But the esteem inspired by his work remains and grows, while the vogue of all works of poetry and art but the best, and the high-pitched admiration which goes with vogue, diminish and disappear; and this redresses the balance. Five-and-twenty years ago it would have seemed absurd, in France, to place Sainte-Beuve, as a French author, on a level with Lamartine. Lamartine had at that time still his vogue, and though 10 assuredly no Molière or Milton, had for the time of his vogue the halo which surrounds properly none but great poets like these. To this Sainte-Beuve cannot pretend, but what does Lamartine retain of it now? It would still be absurd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level with Molière or Milton; is it any longer absurd to place him on a level with Lamartine, or even above him? In other words, excellent work in a lower kind counts in the long run above work which is short of excellence in a higher; firstrate criticism has a permanent value greater than that of 20 any but first-rate works of poetry and art.

And Sainte-Beuve's criticism may be called first-rate. His curiosity was unbounded, and he was born a naturalist, carrying into letters, so often the mere domain of rhetoric and futile amusement, the ideas and methods of scientific natural inquiry. And this he did while keeping in perfection the ease of movement and charm of touch which belong to letters properly so called, and which give them their unique power of universal penetration and of propagandism. Man, as he is, and as his history and the productions of his 30 spirit show him, was the object of his study and interest; he strove to find the real data with which, in dealing with man and his affairs, we have to do. Beyond this study he did not go,-to find the real data. But he was determined they should be the real data, and not fictitious and conventional data, if he could help it. This is what, in our judgment, distinguishes him, and makes his work of singular use and instructiveness. Most of us think that we already possess the data required, and have only to proceed to deal with human affairs in the light of them. 40 This is, as is well known, a thoroughly English persuasion.

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