re melodious. His poetry is touched with the music
that is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by his
imagination.

The things that pertain the deepest to humanity are not its fierce
fleshly passions, its feverish ambitions, its proud reasonings, its
tumultuous hopes. They are the things that belong to the hours when
these obsessing forces fade and ebb and sink away. They are the
things that rise up out of the twilight-margins of sleep and death; the
things that come to us on softly stepping feet, like child-mothers
with their first-born in their arms; the things that have the white
mists of dawn about them and the cool breath of evening around
them; the things that hint at something beyond passion and beyond
reason; the things that sound to us like the sound of bells heard
through clear deep water; for the secret of human life is not in its
actions or its voices or its clamorous desires, but in the intervals
between all these--when all these leave it for a moment at rest--and
in the depths of the soul itself the music becomes audible, the music
which is the silence of eternity.

REMY DE GOURMONT

The death of Remy de Gourmont is one of the greatest losses that
European literature has suffered since the death of Oscar Wilde. The
supreme critic is as rare as the supreme artist, and de Gourmont's
critical genius amounted to a miracle of clairvoyance.

He wrote of everything--from the etymological subtleties of the
French language down to the chaste reluctances of female moles. He
touched everything and he touched nothing that he did not adorn.

In America he is unfortunately far less well known than he deserves,
though an admirable translation of "A Night in the Luxembourg,"
published in Boston, and a charming and illuminating essay by Mr.
Robert Parker, have done something to remove this disgrace. As Mr.
Parker truly observes, the essence of de Gourmont's genius is to be
found in an insatiable curiosity which the absolute closing of any
vista of knowledge by the final and authoritative discovery of truth
would paralyse and petrify. He does not, as Mr. Parker justly says,
seek for truth with any hope or even any particular wish, to find it.
Truth found would be truth spoiled. He seeks it from sheer love of
the pursuit. In this respect he is precisely of the stuff out of which
great essayists are made. He is also placed in that special position
from which the illusive phenomena of this challe