shadow of pleasure or content, but that at the end he had found everywhere the oracle of Wisdom, vanity of vanities." He ended with this magnificent thing, which is, perhaps, the last his human power conceived, and I will put it down in his own words : "Of all those vanities, the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory-fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it, and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all longing for that of God." DIALOGUE WITH THE NINE SISTERS. THIS is a little Amaboean thing not very well known but very Horatian and worth setting down here because it is in the manner of so much that he wrote. Its manner is admirable. Its gentleness, persistency and increase are like those of his own small river the Loir. Its last stanza from the middle of the first line "Ceux dont la fantaisie" to the end, should, I think be famous; but an English reader can hardly forgive such an introduction as "Voila sagement dit" to so noble a finale. |