shing oddity almost to madness.

Through all his works, what a mixture of genius and grotesqueness, of
majesty and absurdity in that wonderful man! Take his "Ninety-Three"--a
novel monstrously nonsensical and surprisingly splendid--a novel
demonstrating that to pass from the ridiculous to the sublime, as well
as the other way, needs but a step. With what magnetic power one of its
first incidents, the rushing about of the loose gun on shipboard, is
wrought out! You begin by despising the frivolity of the scene, and
momentarily wait to see the writer ludicrously break down in his
preposterous attempt at imposing on your credulity. By degrees the
situation is filled in till each successive objection of skepticism is
somehow spirited away, and even the foreign reader, sympathetically
following the working of the French mind, is startled at his own
yielding. This episode of the roving cannon ranks with the devil-fish
scene in the "Toilers of the Sea," where also the reader finds
appreciative horror overcoming his first impulse of contemptuous
incredulity.

Or, again, if you take the boat scene in "Ninety-Three," between the
sailor and count, you agree, at the end, that it is not overstrained.
Yet think of that frail skiff in the open British Channel, with the
waves running high, and say if the scene was possible. When Halmalo put
down his oars and the old man stood up at full height in the bow, the
boat must have swung into the trough of the sea and capsized in an
instant; if lack of steering failed to upset her, the old man's
performance would have done so; but we forget that trifle in the
dramatic intensity of the situation. The learned Sergeant Hill, talking
with a young law student regarding the will of "Clarissa Harlowe," told
him, "You will find that not one of the uses or trusts in it can be
supported." A sergeant of artillery would be equally severe on the
evolutions and skirmishes in "Ninety-Three"; but the genius of Hugo
triumphs over such blunders, like Shakespeare's over the seaports in
Bohemia.

"A poet is a world shut up in a man," says the "Legende," whose own
variety of theme helps to justify the definition. We have here the
majestic conceptions of the "Mur des Siecles," the "Vanished City," the
"Hymn to Earth," the "Epic of the Worm"; therewith we also have the
music and beauty of the "Groupe des Idylles." On one page the reader
is touched with sympathy by the "Cemetery of Eylau" and the "Guerre
Civile";