te dramatic form. The libretto
was founded on his own romance _Notre-Dame de Paris_ (1831), an
evocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of the
fifteenth century, its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors,
and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black and
white; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, by
its tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the other
actors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an
antithesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted
humanity appeals for pity.

[Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter.]

In the volume of verse which followed _Les Orientales_ after an
interval of two years, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ (1831), Hugo is a
master of his instrument, and does not need to display his miracles
of skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years,
but not therefore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were almost
inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here the
lyrism is that of memory and of the heart--intimate, tender, grave,
with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to the
tranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a
faith in God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue,
the spirit of public indignation breaks forth--

"_Et j'ajoute a ma lyre une corde d'airain._"

The spirit of the _Chants du Crespuscule_ (1835) is one of doubt,
trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy is
already waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two things
that are majestic--the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular
flood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings.
But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of weltering
mist. _Les Voix Interieures_ (1837) resumes the tendencies of the
two preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. is reverently saluted;
the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people grows
clearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear;
the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in the
symbolic _La Vache_, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of all
living things. In _Les Rayons et les Ombres_ (1840), Nature is not
only the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul,
mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's _Le Lac_ and Musset's
_Souvenir_ find a companion, not more pure, but of