Ton âme interrogée est prête à leur répondre ;
Tu te reconnais bon, puis meilleur ; tu sens fondre
Comme la neige au feu, ton orgueil, tes fureurs,
Le mal, les préjugés, les rois, les empereurs !
Car la science en l'homme arrive la première.
Puis vient la liberté. Toute cette lumière,

C'est à toi, comprends donc, et c'est toi qui l'éteins !
Les buts rêvés par toi sont par le livre atteints.
Le livre en ta pensée entre, il défait en elle

Les liens que l'erreur à la vérité mêle,
Car tout conscience est un noeud gordien.
Il est ton médecin, ton guide, ton gardien.
Ta haine, il la guérit; ta démence, il te l'ôte.
Voilà ce que tu perds, hélas, et par ta faute !
Le livre est ta richesse à toi! c'est le savoir,
Le droit, la vérité, la vertu, le devoir,
Le progrès, la raison dissipant tout délire.
Et tu détruis cela, toi!

-Je ne sais pas lire.

L'Année Terrible. Juin, viii. : “A Qui
La Faute?"

[To Miss Mathilde Blind, the accomplished translator of Strauss's "The Old Faith and the New," author of "The Prophecy of St. Oran, and other Poems," and "George Eliot," in the Eminent Women Series, the compiler is indebted for the following spirited rendering of Victor Hugo's indignant remonstrance. The lines here translated constitute an occurrence in one of the twelve divisions (Juin) of "L'Année Terrible," 1871.

The remonstrance is supposed to be addressed to a Communist, whose incendiary rage has just destroyed a Parisian Library. After having been eloquently reproached for quenching the light of reason in his own soul, and destroying his own heritage, the Communist replies in that epigrammatic ending so characteristic of Victor Hugo, and so crushingly unanswerable: "I cannot read."]

Translation.

'Tis you then burned the library?

I brought the fire.

I did,

-O most unheard-of crime, Crime, wretch, which you upon yourself commit! Why, you have quenched the light of your own soul ! 'Tis your own torch which you have just put out! That which your impious madness has dared burn, Was your own treasure, fortune, heritage! The Book (the master's bugbear) is your gain! The Book has ever taken side with you.

A Library implies an act of faith

Which generations still in darkness hid

Sign in their night in witness of the dawn.

What! miscreant, you fling your flaming torch
Into this pile of venerable truths,

These master-works that thunder forth and lighten,
Into this tomb become time's inventory,
Into the ages, the antique man, the past
Which still spells out the future-history
Which having once begun will never end,

Into the poets! Into this mine of Bibles
And all this heap divine-dread Eschylus,
Homer, and Job upright against th' horizon,
Molière, Voltaire and Kant you set on fire!
Thus turning human reason into smoke!
Have you forgotten that your liberator

Is this same Book? The Book that's set on high
And shines; because it lightens and illumes;
It undermines the gallows, war and famine;
It speaks; the Slave and Pariah disappear.
Open a Book. Plato, Beccaria, Milton,
Those prophets, Dante, Shakspeare or Corneille,
Shall not their great souls waken yours in you?
Dazzled you feel the same as each of them;
Reading you grow more gentle, pensive, grave;
Within your heart you feel these great men grow;
They teach you as the dawn lights up a cloister,
And as their warm beams penetrate your heart
You are appeased and thrill with stronger life;
Your soul interrogated answers theirs;

You feel you're good, then better;-as snow in fire-
Then melt away your pride, your prejudice,

Evil and rage and Kings and Emperors!
For Science, see you, first lays hold of men,
Then Liberty, and all this flood of light,
Mark me, 'tis you who have extinguished it!
The goal you dreamt of by the Book was reached;
The Book enters your thoughts and there unties
The bonds wherein truth was by error held,
For each man's conscience is a Gordian knot.
The Book is your physician, guardian, guide :
It heals your hate, and cures your frenzied mood.

See what you lose by your own fault, alas!

Why, know the Book's your wealth! The Book means truth,

Knowledge and Duty, Virtue, Progress, Right,
And Reason scattering hence delirious dreams.
And you destroy this, you!

I cannot read.

LORD LYTTON (E. L. BULWER). 1803-1873.

“I say, then, that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. In a great grief like that, you cannot tickle and divert the mind; you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb— bury it in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth. fore, for the irremediable sorrows of middle life and old age, I recommend a strict chronic course of science and hard reasoning-Counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we have not all got mathematical heads,) something in the reach of the humblest understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest-a new language-Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh ! For the loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the understanding—I would

There

administer something elegant and cordial. For as the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe that poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them two separate men, quite distinct from each other-the imaginative man, and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture of these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half practical. There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest, the very 'poet of circumstance,' as Gray has finely called him ; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker's book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed

'Virgil the wise,

Whose verse walks highest, but not flies,'

as Cowley expresses it.

But Virgil still has genius enough to be two men-to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed, and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard. There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good things of this life; but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura. There is Shakspeare, who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyreal fancy-and a great many more, whom I need not