Souls that anew to the body return, and the fetters of clay?
Can there be any who long for the light thus blindly as they?»

"Listen, and I will resolve thee the doubt," Anchises replies. Then unfolds him in order the tale of the earth and the skies.

"In the beginning, the earth, and the sky, and the spaces of night, Also the shining moon, and the sun Titanic and bright,

Fed on an inward life, and with all things mingled, a mind

Moves universal matter, with Nature's frame is combined.

Thence man's race, and the beast, and the bird that on pinions flies,
All wild shapes that are hidden the gleaming waters beneath,
Each elemental seed, has a fiery force from the skies;
Each its heavenly being, that no dull clay can disguise,

Bodies of earth ne'er deaden, nor limbs long destined to death. Hence their fears and desires; their sorrows and joys: for their sight, Blind with the gloom of a prison, discerns not the heavenly light.

"Now, when at last life leaves them, do all sad ills, that belong
Unto the sinful body, depart; still many survive
Lingering with them, alas! for it needs must be that the long
Growth should in wondrous fashion at full completion arrive.
So due vengeance racks them, for deeds of an earlier day

Suffering penance, and some to the winds hang viewless and thin, Searched by the breezes; from others the deep infection of sin Swirling water washes, or bright fire purges, away.

Each, in his own sad ghost, we endure; then pass to the wide
Realms of Elysium. Few in the fields of the happy abide,

Till great Time, when the cycles have run their courses on high, Takes the inbred pollution, and leaves to us only the bright

Sense of heaven's own ether, and fire from the springs of the sky. When for a thousand years they have rolled their wheels through the night,

God to the Lethe river recalls this myriad train,

That with remembrance lost once more they may visit the light,
And, at the last, have desire for a life in the body again."

[The future heroes of Rome pass by: among the last, the Marcelli. The death of the young Marcellus, nephew and heir of Augustus, had recently occurred when this book was read by Virgil at court. The bereft mother was said to have fainted at this passage.]

"Lo where decked in a conqueror's spoils Marcellus, my son, Strides from the war! How he towers o'er all of the warrior train!

"When Rome reels with the shock of the wild invaders' alarm,
He shall sustain her state. From his war-steed's saddle his arm
Carthage and rebel Gaul shall destroy, and the arms of the slain
Victor a third time hang in his father Quirinus's fane."

Then Æneas,- for near him a youth seemed ever to pace,
Fair, of an aspect princely, with armor of glittering grace,
Yet was his forehead joyless, his eye cast down as in grief,—
"Who can it be, my father, that walks at the side of the chief?
Is it his son, or perchance some child of his glorious race
Born from remote generations? And hark, how ringing a cheer
Breaks from his comrades round! What a noble presence is here!
Though dark night with her shadow of woe floats over his face!"

Answer again Anchises began with a gathering tear:
"Ask me not, O my son, of thy children's infinite pain!
Fate one glimpse of the boy to the world will grant, and again
Take him from life. Too puissant methinks to immortals on high
Rome's great children had seemed, if a gift like this from the sky
Longer had been vouchsafed! What wailing of warriors bold
Shall from the funeral plain to the War-god's city be rolled!
What sad pomp thine eyes will discern, what pageant of woe,
When by his new-made tomb thy waters, Tiber, shall flow!
Never again such hopes shall a youth of thy lineage, Troy,
Rouse in his great forefathers of Latium! Never a boy
Nobler pride shall inspire in the ancient Romulus-land!
Ah, for his filial love! for his old-world faith! for his hand
Matchless in battle! Unharmed what foemen had offered to stand
Forth in his path, when charging on foot for the enemy's ranks,
Or when plunging the spur in his foam-flecked courser's flanks!
Child of a nation's sorrow! if thou canst baffle the Fates'
Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates,
Thine to become Marcellus! I pray thee, bring me anon
Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son,
Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least,
Doing the dead, though vainly, the last sad service."

Translation of Sir Charles Bowen

EUGÈNE-MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ

(1848-1910)

UGÈNE-MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ, Vicomte, and descendant of an old French aristocratic family, was born at Nice in 1848. His

youth, apart from the terms at college, was spent rather monotonously at the old «château» of Gourdan in the Cevennes Mountains. Here he read Bossuet, Pascal, and Saint-Simon; soon Romanticism began to hold his young imagination; he studied Rousseau; of Victor Hugo he said many years later: «The Orientales) are still singing in our memory like the most delightful music that ever intoxicated us at twenty.»> But the true masters of his thought and of his talent at that time were Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Alfred de Vigny. In their works he found the expression of his own ardent dreams, his love of travel, of foreign countries, and of the Orient in particular.

Hardly twenty years old, he followed his passionate longing for the South and went to Italy, taking with him, amongst his luggage, his first poetical efforts. Political events, however, broke in rudely upon his dreams. At the first reverses to French arms, in 1870, he offered his services to his country. Two of his cousins fell in battle almost immediately; his younger brother died at his side at Sedan; he himself, seriously wounded, became a prisoner of war and was interned at Magdeburg until the end of hostilities. Disappointment and humiliation led him to deep reflection, and became one of the most decisive and lasting impressions of his life. National disaster had taught him a lesson which he felt called upon to convey to his readers at every opportunity. On the first of January, 1890, he wrote, in the preface to a series of essays entitled (Regards historiques et littéraires, an open letter addressed «To those who are twenty years old,» containing the following words:

"It is now nearly twenty years ago that the truth made itself known in a flood to the one who writes these lines, as to many others,-to all those who were being carried along the road to Germany on the night of the first and second of September, 1870. The miserable procession was descending the slopes that lay between Bazeilles and Douzy. Below us the bivouac fires of the conquerors starred the valley of the Meuse. From the field of blood where were camped the hundred thousand men whom we thought sleeping,

worn out with their victory, there arose upon the air one strong, one single voice from the hundred thousand breasts. They sang the hymn of Luther. The solemn prayer spread over the whole horizon, it filled the heavens, as far as there were fires-Germans. Far along in the night we heard it: it was so grand, so majestic, that not one of us could help thrilling with awe; even those, who, crushed by suffering and fatigue, were being driven out of what had been France,- even they forgot their grief for a moment in the unwelcome emotion. More than one of us, young as we were, and unripened by reflection, saw clearly in that moment what power it was that had vanquished us: it was not the girdle of steel cannon, nor the weight of regiments; it was the one superior soul, made up of all those different souls, steeped in one Divine national faith, firmly convinced that behind their cannon, God was marching with them at the side of their old King.»

«Methods of instruction and military training," he exclaims, «Krupp cannon and Mauser guns-nothing but accidents, all those things! Accidental also the sagacity of a Moltke, and of his lieutenants. What made these instruments terrible? The serious submissive soul of the people who used them!”

He, almost more than anyone else in France, saw the necessity of the Nation's return to religious ideals; and he fearlessly set forth this view even in the presence of freethinkers like Jules Ferry. At the conclusion of his essay on Tolstoy, he says: «And we, how shall we escape Nihilism and Pessimism, these phenomena that have so little of the true French spirit in them, and that yet for fifteen years past have invaded our literature and burst into the view of those even who are least able to discern? Shall we end by adopting Mysticism? There is reason to believe that our national temperament will preserve us from that; we may hope that the religious idea, the necessary goal of all progress, will in the end comfort those young talents who deny and suffer with so much bitterness, or that it will raise fresh talents if these have gone under.»> A few years later he was able to express himself more hopefully and decisively, on a matter which was so dear to his heart, in an article on the Neo-Christian movement in France, which he wrote for Harper's Magazine.

Vogüé's greatest work was his critical study on the Russian Novel.) In 1876, after having, for some time, been engaged on matters of diplomacy at Constantinople, and after having visited Syria, Palestine, Greece, and Egypt, he went to St. Petersburg as Secretary to the French Embassy. Two years later, he married a Russian, the sister of General Annenkoff. The idea of his great work seems to have been suggested to him first by Countess Alexis Tolstoy; but it was not until he had realized all the possibilities of such a work «as the necessary preliminary to any serious political efforts,» that he threw himself vigorously into the task. His method of bringing the characteristics of the great Russian authors within the imagination of his French readers is of the simplest and yet most powerful; with a few strokes of his pen, he evokes an idea already familiar to French minds. «Turgeniew," he says, «has

the grace and poesy of Corot; Tolstoy the simple greatness of Rousseau; Dostoevsky the tragic austerity of Millet. Mourasow (the hero in one of Gogol's books) is no other than Monsieur Madeleine of Hugo's (Les Misérables. >>>

The value of the Roman russe› has been far from diminishing with the years; in the estimation of the best critics, it ranks with Madame de Staël's De L'Allemagne) and Taine's History of English Literature.) The following criticism, written by Brunetière in the Revue des deux Mondes, on the morrow of the publication of Vogue's work, will probably be also the judgment of posterity:

«Without exaggeration it may be said that by analysing the Russian novel in the way he did, and by appreciating the great writers, Gogol, Turgeneff, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, Vogüé has joined himself to their number; he puts into their work no less of his own than he borrows from them; he disengages their thought from the veils or mists in which they like to clothe it, and, while making a place for them in the history of contemporary thought, he at the same time marks his own very deeply. Vogue shows himself in his book always equal to his subject, often superior to it, and yet this subject was for many reasons, one of the widest, almost the newest, one of the most complex and difficult that could tempt the ambition of a critic or of a philosophical historian.>>

The brilliant success of the Roman russe) opened the doors of the Academy to Vogué when he was barely forty years old. The complete list of his works is as rich in number as it is varied in subject matter. The following belong to the best of his publications: (Histoires orientales) (1879), ‹Portraits du Siècle) (1883), (Souvenirs et Visions) (1887), (Remarques sur l'exposition du Centenaire) (1889), (Spectacles contemporains) (1891), (Cœurs russes) (1894), Devant le Siècle) (1896), (Regards historiques et littéraires) (1897), (Histoire et poésie) (1898), Le rappel des Ombres) (1900), and (Sous l'Horizon) (1904).

Most of these books consist of series of short essays and sketches, betraying the author's universal interests. In one or two novels, de Vogué was perhaps less brilliantly successful; yet Jean d'Argrève) (1899) contains some very vivid reminiscences of the war, while (Les morts qui parlent) (1899) relates the author's own unpleasant impressions, during his short and regrettable term in the Palais-Bourbon, as deputy for the Ardèche. The literary form in which he excelled, and which he continued to use most frequently until his death, in 1910, was the essay, and even the short magazine article.

Gran Ting