hiefly
inspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reduced
to peace. The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote,
and petitioned. She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyons
gaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.

During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from her
contemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art of
French verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praised
her as one of the poets of France. The later critics--from Verlaine
onwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight
irregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for upon
this liberty they themselves have largely improved. The old rules in
their completeness seemed too much like a prison to her. She was set
about with importunate conditions--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings in
strange towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she took only a little
gentle liberty.

THE HOURS OF SLEEP

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are
they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and
punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without
languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day
mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in
dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in
dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the
mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a
tide's, and they do return.

In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper her
influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of the
sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love,
contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real day
persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity.
This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the
night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length.

The child, not asleep, but passing through the hours of sleep and their
dominions, knows that the mood of night will have its hour; he puts off
his troubled heart, and will answer it another time, in the other state,
by day. "I shall be able to bear this when I am grown up" is not oftener
in a young child's mind than "I shall endure to think