fancy interesting in literature ends in
maudlin failure. But at length the painters have found an equal, or
more than an equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less easily
than colour and form to the reproduction of the beauty and life of
childhood. In his poetry Victor Hugo had already shown his passing
sensibility to the pathos of the beginnings of our life; witness such
pieces as _Chose vue un Jour de Printemps, Les Pauvres Gens_, the
well-known pieces in _L'Annee Terrible_, and a hundred other lively
touches and fragments of finished loveliness and penetrating sympathy.
In prose it is a more difficult feat to collect the trivial details
which make up the life of the tiny human animal into a whole that
shall be impressive, finished, and beautiful. And prose can only
describe by details enumerated one by one. This most arduous feat
is accomplished in the children's summer day in the tower, and with
enchanting success. Intensely realistic, yet the picture overflows
with emotion--not the emotion of the mother, but of the poet. There
is infinite tenderness, pathos, love, but all heightened at once and
strengthened by the self-control of masculine force. A man writing
about little ones seems able to place himself outside, and thus to
gain more calmness and freedom of vision than the more passionate
interest or yearning of women permits to them in this field of art.
Not a detail is spared, yet the whole is full of delight and pity and
humour. Only one lyric passage is allowed to poetise and accentuate
the realism of the description. Georgette, some twenty months old,
scrambles from her cradle and prattles to the sunbeam.

"What a bird says in its song, a child says in its prattle. 'Tis
the same hymn; a hymn indistinct, lisping, profound. The child has
what the bird has not, the sombre human destiny in front of it.
Hence the sadness of men as they listen, mingling with the joy of
the little one as it sings. The sublimest canticle to be heard on
earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy.
That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than
an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal
to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the
threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant? This
ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the
lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless bei