fuller harmonies,
in the _Tristesse d'Olympio_; reminiscences of childhood are
magically preserved in the poem of the _Feuillantines_.

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine,
he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressed
his spirits. In 1843 his daughter Leopoldine and her husband of a
few short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much
to magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exile
who launched his prose invective _Napoleon le Petit_. A year later
appeared _Les Chatiments_, in which satire, with some loss of critical
discernment, is infused with a passionate lyrical quality,
unsurpassed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur.
The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored him
to himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errors
of genius.

The volumes of _Les Contemplations_ (1856) mark the culmination of
Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The earlier pieces are of the past,
from 1830 to 1843, and resemble the poems of the past. A group of
poems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beauty
and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, in
nature, and in God. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner.
The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and of
light; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom;
and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song.

But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet was
to carry all his lyric passion into an epic presentation, in detached
scenes, of the life of humanity. The first part of _La Legende des
Siecles_ was published in 1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the
birth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and
events unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beauty
and sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals are
pursued by the great avengers. The spirit of _Les Chatiments_ is
conveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants and
priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This poem is
the epopee of democratic passions.

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's romance _Les
Miserables_ (1862). The subject now is modern; the book is rather
the chaos of a prose epic than a novel; the hero is the high-souled
outcast of society; everything presses into