ore this century; there is a time for all things, and it will
be enough to remember death when its hour strikes. "Mademoiselle," said
La Mousse to the future Madame de Grignan, too careful of her beautiful
hands, "all that will decay." "Yes, but it is not decayed yet," answered
Mademoiselle de Sevigne, summing up in a single word the philosophy of
many French lives. We will sorrow to-morrow, if need be, and even then,
if possible, without darkening our neighbours' day with any grief of
ours. Let us retire from life, as from a drawing-room, discreetly, "as
from a banquet," said La Fontaine.[66] And this good grace, which is not
indifference, but which little resembles the anguish and enthusiasms of
the North, is also in its way the mark of strong minds. For they were
not made of insignificant beings, those generations who went to battle
and left the world without a sneer or a tear; with ribbons on the
shoulder and a smile on the lips.[67]

Examples of Anglo-Saxon poems, either dreamy or warlike, could easily be
multiplied. We have the lamentations of the man without a country, of
the friendless wanderer, of the forlorn wife, of the patronless singer,
of the wave-tossed mariner; and these laments are always associated with
the grand Northern landscapes of which little had been made in ancient
literatures:

"That the man knows not, to whom on land all falls out most joyfully,
how I, miserable and sad on the ice-cold sea, a winter pass'd, with
exile traces ... of dear kindred bereft, hung o'er with icicles, the
hail in showers flew; where I heard nought save the sea roaring, the
ice-cold wave. At times the swan's song I made to me for pastime ...
night's shadow darken'd, from the north it snow'd, frost bound the land,
hail fell on the earth, coldest of grain...." Or, in another song:
"Then wakes again the friendless mortal, sees before him fallow ways,
ocean fowls bathing, spreading their wings, rime and snow descending
with hail mingled; then are the heavier his wounds of heart."[68]

There are descriptions of dawn in new and unexpected terms: "The guest
slept within until the black raven, blithe-hearted, gave warning of the
coming of the heaven's joy, the bright sun, and of robbers fleeing
away."[69] Never did the terraces of Rome, the peristyles of Athens, the
balconies of Verona, see mornings dawn like unto these, to the raven's
merry shriek. The sea of the Anglo-Saxons is not the Mediterranean,
washing with its blue