ng. Ill, if it
shall come, will be an abuse of confidence.

"The child's murmuring is more and is less than words; there are
no notes, and yet it is a song; there are no syllables, and yet it
is a language.... This poor stammering is a compound of what the
child said when it was an angel, and of what it will say when
it becomes a man. The cradle has a Yesterday as the grave has a
Morrow; the Morrow and the Yesterday mingle in that strange cooing
their twofold mystery...."

"Her lips smiled, her eyes smiled, the dimples in her cheeks
smiled. There came forth in this smile a mysterious welcome of the
morning. The soul has faith in the ray. The heavens were blue,
warm was the air. The fragile creature, without knowing anything,
or recognising anything, or understanding anything, softly
floating in musings which are not thought, felt itself in safety
in the midst of nature, among those good trees and that guileless
greenery, in the pure and peaceful landscape, amid the rustle of
nests, of flowing springs, of insects, of leaves, while over all
there glowed the great innocency of the sun" (ii. 104).

As an eminent man has recently written about Wordsworth's most famous
Ode, there may be some bad philosophy here, but there is assuredly
some noble and touching poetry.

If the carelessness of infancy is caught with this perfection of
finish, there is a tragic companion piece in the horror and gnawing
anguish of the wretched woman from whom her young have been taken--her
rescue from death, her fierce yearnings for them like the yearnings of
a beast, her brute-like heedlessness of her life and her body in the
cruel search.

And so the poet conducts us along the strange excursive windings of
the life and passion of humanity. The same hand which draws such noble
figures as Gauvain--and the real Lanjuinais of history was fully as
heroic and as noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction--is equally
skilful in drawing the wild Breton beggar who dwells underground among
the branching tree-roots; and the monstrous Imanus, the barbarous
retainer of the Lord of the Seven Forests; and Radoub, the serjeant
from Paris, a man of hearty oaths, hideous, heroic, humoursome, of
a bloody ingenuity in combat. And the same hand which described the
silent sundown on the sandy shore of the bay, and the mysterious
darkness of the forests, and the blameless play of the little on