the soul. 'Let her deathly life pass into death,' says one of his
earliest characters, 'like music on the night wind.' And, in _Death's
Jest Book_, Sibylla has the same thoughts:

O Death! I am thy friend,
I struggle not with thee, I love thy state:
Thou canst be sweet and gentle, be so now;
And let me pass praying away into thee,
As twilight still does into starry night.

Did his mind, obsessed and overwhelmed by images of death, crave at last
for the one thing stranger than all these--the experience of it? It is
easy to believe so, and that, ill, wretched, and abandoned by Degen at
the miserable Cigogne Hotel, he should seek relief in the gradual
dissolution which attends upon loss of blood. And then, when he had
recovered, when he was almost happy once again, the old thoughts,
perhaps, came crowding back upon him--thoughts of the futility of life,
and the supremacy of death and the mystical whirlpool of the unknown,
and the long quietude of the grave. In the end, Death had grown to be
something more than Death to him--it was, mysteriously and
transcendentally, Love as well.

Death's darts are sometimes Love's. So Nature tells,
When laughing waters close o'er drowning men;
When in flowers' honied corners poison dwells;
When Beauty dies: and the unwearied ken
Of those who seek a cure for long despair
Will learn ...

What learning was it that rewarded him? What ghostly knowledge of
eternal love?

If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell's murky haze,
Heaven's blue pall?
--Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy.--
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.

--Know'st thou not ghosts to sue?
No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
And breathe thy last.
So out of Life's fresh crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
Thus are the ghosts to woo;
Thus are all dreams made true,
Ever to last!

1907.

HENRI BEYLE

In the whole of French literature it would be difficult to point to a
figure at once so important, so remarkable, and so little known to
English readers as Henri Beyle. Most of us are, no doubt, fairly
familiar with his pseudonym of 'Stendhal'; some of us have read _Le
Rouge et Le Noir_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_; but how many of us have
any further knowledge of a man whose works a