hts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at
Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the
scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all
silent, dead,--the last sob spent,'--the priest's thanksgiving for the
Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying
their Te Deum laudamus.'

Hat Gott der Herr den Koerperstoff erschaffen,
Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein boeser Geist,
Darueber stritten sie mit allen Waffen
Und werden von den Voegeln nun gespeist,
Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,
Die Koerper da sich lassen wohl behagen.

'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did
some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might
they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit
gorging merrily over their carrion, _without asking from whence it
came_.'

In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death--death has no
terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and
then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed,
or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most
offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of
death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul,
whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is
what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her
stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a
wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted--doubly revolted, one
would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are
affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we
lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy
of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds
through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all
the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few
lines; the sense of wasted nobleness--nobleness spending its energies
upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream--at any
rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in
spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to
itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken
down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say