Ton âme interrogée est prête à leur répondre ; C'est à toi, comprends donc, et c'est toi qui l'éteins ! -Je ne sais pas lire. L'Année Terrible. Juin, viii.: “A Qui [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 Into the poets! Into this mine of Bibles Is this same Book? The Book that's set on high You feel you're good, then better;-as snow in fire- 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, 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. Therefore, 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 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 |