realism of words, he resembles Villon, | aspect of society, although not, per Rabelais, and Regnier. His humor is haps, in the manner of Spenser, Keats, so natural that the fun seems part of or Tennyson, of Shakespeare or Brownthe things themselves, and so true that ing. Burns possessed, however, a it never disfigures reality or savors of feeling for color, for brilliant detail, a caricature. The French critic declares taste for gracefulness of movement and that it reminds him of French gaiety, for harmonious sounds, and his appreof the joviality that lurks in French ciation of the beauty of women is bewines, and also of the wit and merri-yond dispute. The poet who pleaded ment of many French writers. Neither so eloquently for liberty and equality does he forget that tears and true hu- cannot be denied a feeling for what is mor are never far apart. On the roads in Ayr you may often meet merry, laughing girls. They walk in short petticoats, with animated gestures. They are smaller, less poetical than English girls, put better proportioned and more lively. Their limbs are more delicately formed, heir step lighter, more alert. If a fat armer, sitting his horse awkwardly, passes, hey jeer at him and laugh consumedly. But if they see a little wounded bird, tears come into their eyes before the merriment has had time to fade from their counte hances. The humor of Burns resembles hem. great and noble in life. Wordsworth and Coleridge were affected by similar feelings, but they regarded equality from the standpoint of historical philosophers; they saw it as a promise for the future, they had the optimism of the ideal. Burns was more terrestrial; he hated inequality, and demanded immediate relief. It is not surprising that M. Angellier should find Burns one of the most charming, and perhaps the most varied, of love poets. He grows eloquent on the subject: All phases of love are included and described. Early bashfulness, chaste confes M. Angellier devotes some pages to broving that Burns possessed the qualties that go to the making of a drama- sions, transient dreams, felicity, anguish, reproaches, despair, the pain of parting, ist, and that, under more favorable the eager, passionate joy of secret and rare ircumstances, he would very likely possession, the heavy intoxication of comhave followed in the footsteps of monplace possession, declarations thrown Shakespeare. We confess to a certain out in passing as if by a hurried traveller, istrust of criticism of the might-have- memories long carried in the heart's blood, Been order. To our mind the best professions of inconstancy and oaths of roof that Burns would never have fidelity, humility and revolt in the face of hade a dramatist, great or small, lies disdain, the worship inspired by the soul n the fact that he did not become one. and that inspired by the body, the delight Poets and others have written trage- of the beginning and the bitterness of the ies in their youth, but have failed end of love, chaste reveries and burning desires, friendship that is almost love, and evertheless to become great dramalove that is on the highroad to friendship, sts in their prime. Like Chaucer, the ecstasies, the trials, every shade of a ke Browning, Burns had a strong deep passion in its transports and delicacy, ramatic sense; he makes his charac- a mingling and confusion of everything ers speak to us themselves. But the ossession of such a sense, very highly eveloped, did not make Browning's lays a success on the stage. We conude that therein lies the true test of a rama's excellence. Besides his gift of humor and of een observation, M. Angellier finds in urns the gift of seeing the nobleness things, the beauty that there is in fe. He was sensible of the artistic Be poetic, refined, and brutal with which love men. The finest of the love poems are un doubtedly those addressed to " High-as a frame for his passions and his toil. land Mary," who, from a standpoint of literary consequences, deserves to rank, so M. Angellier declares, with Laura and Graziella. The love that Burns celebrates in song is the frankest, most impersonal, most general that has ever existed. It is made of pure emotion, of unalloyed passion. It is the love of everybody, accessible to all, the most universal ever yet sung by a poet. He restored ardent, passionate love to English literature. He will remain the poet of young, frank, fresh, sincere love, happy or unhappy in itself, love that is only love, the love of sweet-and-twenty, in which, according to Shakespeare, it is always May. He is the only poet among the moderus who loved nature in the fashion of the ancients. His likeness must be sought among the old Greeks, who alone loved nature with the simplicity of Burns. In conclusion, M. Angellier thinks that Burns stands apart from all other English poets as the veritable singer of the peasants and the poor: Others have attempted to relate their sorrows and their joys; they have sung the poor. Here it is the poor themselves who sing. They speak on their own behalf. They lift their heads; they proclaim themselves prouder and happier than others. They claim the right of being fully men, often better men than those above them. A long chapter is devoted to Burns's feeling for nature, and certain fallacies that have grown up concerning it are corrected. To state briefly the conclusions arrived at, we may say that Burns turned the feelings of a peasant into works of art. He not only contemplated nature, but he toiled at her. This rapid sketch in no way claims Fine as are his landscapes, reminding to be an exhaustive account of M. Ar us of Millet's paintings, and deeply as gellier's able and sympathetic criticism his poems are penetrated with nature, of Burns. We have only roughly indihe regarded her chiefly as a background cated its lines and endeavored to emfor human activity, and thus differs phasize those parts of it likely to prove considerably from Wordsworth, Shel-attractive to British readers. For rea ley, and Keats, of whom he is often sons stated before, we have carefully regarded as a forerunner. In his love kept ourselves in the background, and for animals he stands alone. He knew have attempted nothing more than w them well, rejoiced with them in their set before our readers as clearly as ma happiness and sorrowed with them in be the point of view of the Frenc their pain. Perhaps it is to the deep critic. The work must have cost hi tenderness, the pity, the compassion, considerable care and trouble; a mos and affection for all animated things formidable list of volumes, English that Burns owes his originality in re- French, and German, consulted in the gard to nature. Wordsworth was too course of its preparation, is appended serene, too far removed from particular Sometimes it would seem that the latest phenomena. Shelley possessed tender- editions and most trustworthy biog ness, but it was vague, impersonal, phies of English writers have bee elementary, applying itself rather to overlooked, but that is perhaps iner atmospheric forces than to animated itable when one is not on the spa beings. Cowper approaches nearest Neither can we call to mind any po Burns in this particular. Burns has by Tennyson on Mary Stuart. C also nothing in common with the feel- M. Angellier know the drama "Que ing for nature of our modern poets. Mary" by its title only? But whe He never occupies himself with nature so much is excellent, to carp at trife for her own sake, the characteristic is little-minded indeed; and all love note of modern poetry; he regards her of poetry owe sincere gratitude to Y Angellier for his careful, sympathetic, | ancient stock of this slim rustling un and luminous study Of him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountainside. From The Contemporary Review. SPRING IN THE WOODS OF VALOIS. I. derwood; nothing looks older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared! II. CHANTILLY is the game preserve of a hunter-prince, and everything about it is ordered for the chase. Those wide-open, grassy glades studded with "THE prettiest April still wears a birch or oak-scrub are haunted by the wreath of frost!" So runs the old deer; and in those thickets of golden French proverb, proved false for once broom the heavy does prepare their by this mirific April of 1893. By the nurseries. Great, floundering, russet end of the month the heat was parched pheasants come flying by; at every step as midsummer; roses and strawberries a hare or a white-tailed rabbit starts up were hawked through the streets of out of the grass. At the further end of Paris; the dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a plunge into the great forests of the North. O for the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand years! 'Tis something to feel oneself in a Gaulish forest though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But here at least, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors which may have shadowed Pharamond. the forest, there are deep, unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place ; for the wild boar delights in them. As we walk or drive down the neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appear impassable to the traveller, and we wonder at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman. Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful venery, for, thick as grass, thick and sweet, the lily of the valley springs in all the brakes and shady places. The scent of the game will not lie across these miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair, and At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training stables, and parched, oblong race- the deer, still deafened with the win1 course. 'Tis a true French village, ter's yelp of the hounds-the deer, with its one endless winding street, who sets his back against the sturdiest * pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. oak, and butts at the pack with his antFrom almost any point of it you see, lers, who swims the lakes, and from beyond the houses, a glint of waters his island refuge sells his life as hard and hear a rustle of woods. There is as he can- the deer, accustomed to be an indescribable airy lightness about always vanquished, beholds himself at the place, about the fresh, fine air, the last befriended by an ally more invinciloose sand of the soil, the thin green ble than water or forest oak, by the boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, sweet, iunumerable white lily, innocent the smooth-trunked beechen glades as himself, that every May-time sends that are never allowed to grow into the huntsmen home. great forest trees. It is with an effort The lily that saves the deer is the of the imagination that we realize the consolation of poor women. Every morning during the brief season of its | asleep amid the trees; a turreted white blossom they are up before the dawn. castle rises out of a sedgy island, and Holding their children by the hand they appears the very palace of the Belle au are off to the innermost dells of its Bois dormant. These are the Pools of forest; and before our breakfast time Commelle - pools or lakes? Pool is they are back at the railway stations of too small and lake too large for the Chantilly or Creil, laden with bunches good French word étang. They are of lilies, which they sell to the dusty considerable lakelets, some miles round, passengers bound by the morning mails four in a row, connected each with for London or for Brussels. Sweet each. They lie in a sheltered valley, flowers with the dew upon them, fra- almost a ravine, whose romantic char grant posies, who would not give a acter contrasts with the rest of the forfive-penny piece for so much beauty? est. Here the clipped and slender trees "What would you buy with your roses of Chantilly give place to an older and that is worth your roses ?" sings the more stately vegetation. The gnarled Persian poet. They would know what roots of the beeches grip the sides of to reply, these tired countrywomen of the hills with an amazing cordage, the Oise new sabots for the goodman, spreading as far over the sandy cliff as a white communion veil for the second their boughs expand above. In the girl, a shawl for the old grandam, and a bottom of the combe, one after another galette for the children's dinner! The lie the four sister pools. The road lilies are a harvest to them, like any winds by their side through meadows other-a sweet, voluntary, unplanted of cowslips, past the bulrushes where harvest that comes three months before the corn is yellow. The lilies were all out when we drove through the wood at Chantilly. I had never seen such a sight, for we had not yet visited Compiègne, where they are still more profuse and, I think, of a larger growth. In the Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely, in timid clumps; and how proud of them we were! But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of any flowers as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall jonquils of Orange, ye have at last a rival in the North! The whole way to Commelle the glades were sweet with lilies. Every traveller from Calais to Paris has marked unwitting the beauty of Commelle. You remember the view that precedes or follows (according to your direction) the little station of Orry Coye? The rails are laid on the summit of a hill; the train rushes through a delicate forest of birch. Suddenly we come upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in a wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the Thève, placid and royal amid its mantling woods; while, on the other side, the hill breaks in a sort of precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets the swan sits on her nest, and past the clear spaces of open water, where her mate swims double on the wave. The brink is brilliant with kingcup in a film of ladysmock. At the end of the last pool the ground rises towards the forest. There are some ruins; an old grey mill rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the grace and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground are exqui sitely tranquil. It is a picture of Vicat Cole's-ù la dixième puissance. We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty's Castle -le Châ teau de la Reine Blanche, as the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the Prince de Joinville. A tradi tion runs that in 1227 the mother of St. Louis had a château here. Six hundred years later, the last of the Condés built the château of to-day, with its four white turrets, the exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. 'Tis the romantic Gothic of Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there is an ancient grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of ar old tune, "Ma Normandie," perhaps, or Combien j'ai douce souvenance." | dens of Le Notre, was a thing to wonThe mill-race rushes loud under the der at and envy. Here Henri, Duke Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers of Montmorency, kept his court and near the hall door. It is very silent, filled his galleries with famous pictures. very peaceful, very deserted. The He was a great patron of the arts. Castle of St. Louis would not have His wife, the "Silvie " of the poets of seemed so old-world as this. her time, has left her name still, like a perfume, among the avenues and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life; but the duke was discontented in his castle; private wealth could not console him for public woes, and he joined in the revolt of Gaston d'Orléans. He was defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner, and beheaded at Toulouse by order of Cardinal Richelieu. "On the scaffold," says St. Simon, "he bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and another to my father." We must make a long road home by the Table Ronde, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to see, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of steps leads steeply down from the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which runs demurely as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer than it looks, and, as sometimes we see a meek-faced, slender little woman, mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great ob long sheet of artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A stone's-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, dazzles in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here into a long, low hill. There we found a score of bloused, bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner nour. Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of pic cures. it The duke was a near kinsman of the Prince of Condé. Until the last, "Silvie" had believed that Condé, powerful and in the king's good graces, would intervene, and save her husband's life. To her surprise, Condé held his peace. The axe fell-and "Silvie" understood, when the king awarded the confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condé. For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued the almost royal pleasure-house, the Versailles of the Princes of Condé. Then the great Revolution razed the castle to the ground. It was not here, but some miles away-at St. Leu-Taverny- that the last Condé died in 1830. Chantilly, which had come into the family by a violent death, left it also in a sombre and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condé was found one morning hanged to the handle of his casement-window. The Before we leave, we must turn round castle of Chantilly passed to the Duc oy the castle, with its fine old gardens d'Aumale. In 1840 he began the labor planted by Le Notre, its vast stables of restoring it; but the Revolution of mposing as a church, its sheets of 1848 sent him into exile, and only in water out of which rises, elegantly 1872 was Chantilly restored to its righturreted, the brand-new château of ful proprietor. Then, like a phoenix, 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles the new castle began to rise swiftly of Touraine. For once there was an from its nest of ash and ruin. It is as older castle here, built by Jean Bullant like the castle of the Renaissance, from or Anne of Montmorency. The great which it descends, as a young child is constable left the splendid palace to like its illustrious ancestor. 'Tis a his son, and in 1632 Chantilly, as it princely and elegant palace, and we stood among the waters and the gar- find no fault with it beyond its youth. |