genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for
theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to
Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn
to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the
pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a
fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing
roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles
of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the
unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these
poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the
anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but
the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the
passing of the gods, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.

Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the
anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was
one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor
Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's
genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a
poetry such as the Parnassian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal,
technically consummate--was at least one of the strings of his
many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works--the very crown and flower of
Hugo's production--belong to this decade, 1850-60,--the _Chatiments_,
_Contemplations_, and _Legende des Siecles_. I said advisedly, one
string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of
the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the
greatest qualities of Parnassian poetry were exemplified in many
splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity
which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as
illustration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first
phase the closing stanzas of his famous _Boaz Endormi_ in the _Legende_,
whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable
is substituted for the Alexandrine.[11]

'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite,
Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare,
Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where,
The sudden mystery of wakening light.

Boaz knew not that there a woman lay,
Nor Ruth what God desired of her could tell;
Fresh