throws its last gleam before dying. It penetrates with its last intuitions the first reflections of adolescence. The intelligence issues from its infancy, without yet being obscured by the vapours of that pathetic life which in a few months is going to begin. Before departing for seven years in the dizziest of fluctuations, the being reposes a moment in a marvelous and touching equilibrium. Never again will the spirit possess a greater suppleness, memory, rapidity to conceive and comprehend. There is nothing one cannot ask of a boy of thirteen. In all the schools, the third form is the class which counts, which contains the most remarkable possibilities. At the end of that year one enters the regular high school course. Something is forever dead. Something else begins.

The sorrowful tension of this period which now commences, this period so sad and yet so unnecessary, so curable, the multiple misunderstandings brought about by its fatal gaucherie, the incapacity for being brief, the efforts without proportion, the harshness and imprudence born of its total impotence, the vain gift of self and the vain candour and the awkward chivalry, unaided, unreturned, and all the false reflections which three thousand years of thought absorbed in ten months can put about the false visages of life... in a single word, there is a virus which invalidates each thought, each sentiment, each gesture of this age. Illusion? Mirage of memory? A defective beacon on the cliff? Possibly, but it lengthens on the water a glistening column. The reflection, not the fire, seems to illuminate the night.

The Ancients have said in other terms: "The vase conserves always the

perfume of the first wine poured into it."

The Abbé. Allow me one observation. "This period so unnecessary" you have said... But this period is in the order of Nature. Your dog also has had a form of the same malady when young. Each one of us is obliged five years to carry the Nessus' shirt predestined for him.

I.—I am not so sure. Little as the conditions which surround an adolescence vary, the intensity of the crisis is varied by the conditions. Observe the apprentice, the boy of the people, without going farther than the outward appearance which, at this age, reveals so much. He has, together with the gravity of the child, the calm of a man who has already attained his development. None of the self-consciousness, none of the gaucherie which marks our collegians. Side by side with them, he has often the air of belonging to a superior race; there is nothing (and this physiological detail has its importance) there is nothing down to the impurity of complexion,so frequent with the ungrateful age in our own class, which is not spared him. The freedom of life, the absence of bad education, the simplicity of the sexual experience, have done all that. Mount a step higher in the social farce, the son of a small employee who attends the professional school has already assumed something of the acridity of our dear bourgeoisie. Believe me. There is no crisis save that brought about by the misunderstanding between the soul and that unknown world which his fear and his desire disfigure. Bring your child into contact with that world quietly, with all the intelligence, all the intuition possible, and his crisis will disappear like a letter in a mail-box. I

swear to you that my future son will know of suffering only that which will develop him, which I will leave to him as the instrument of his virtue.

And this brings me to one of the reasons which justify me (I am replying to your primary objection). One can never bring too much light to bear upon a soul at that moment when its trouble succeeds in provoking a divorce, beside which that of husband and wife seems normal, the divorce between a boy and his parents.

Men have spoken to me. They are twenty-five, thirty-five, forty years old. They were fourteen the day when Life lifted the mask. A Gorgon! and they had believed her an Angel! This is how they have always spoken: "Explain to me, if you can, how it is that my father, my mother, who loved me, saw nothing, understood nothing. My silences, my blushes, the tears I was unable to retain, my door closed and locked, my face at an age when the expression changes if one takes only the resolution to be better, they have nothing observed, nothing suspected, in the son of their blood living under their roof, they who read novels and went to the theatre! Explain, if you can, this monstrous thing." I have sometimes had the desire to respond: "You say that they loved you. Say rather that they did not love you enough."

If you were able to look down into one of the homes from which you have drawn your day-pupils, you would see the father absorbed in the Stock Exchange, with the Vie Parisienne for his leisure; the mother in the cares of mode or the household. At that moment, their son who regards them, lifting his eyes from Caesar and Tacitus, is the only one in that house with a notion

that there exists a civilization of the spirit. Later, for the adolescent, the situation is unchanged, only instead of books open on the table, he has a devouring fire in his heart. For his parents he is a creature unknown; one would say that they harboured an aver. sion for him. The boy rebuffed on every hand develops his power of silence; silence is one of the conquests of the fourteenth year. Terrible silence of that age, so customary, so universal, that when you see a man and a boy side by side, who never address a word to each other, you have no need to ask if they are father and son. O those mournful Sunday walks, never known by me, but so many times encountered, the father and mother, and lagging far from them, as far as possible, as if the very sight of them repelled him, the son whom they have abandoned! He leads his own life, and from it they are excluded. This is why, in certain schools, I have seen boys in tears at the arrival of the long vacation. They were the same who wept at leaving home when they were ten years old.

A

Do not say, as you did a moment ago, that all that is "a law of Nature." cowardly refusal to act, that is how I consider such 'laws.' Whatever I may harbour in the heart, the word 'goodness' is one I never pronounce. One does not love it less for disliking to see it written upon every wall. And nevertheless, whenever I pass before that dispensary on the Avenue de la Motte Picquet with its signboard: "Be good to the young," I think that this goodness alone would suffice, with a little intelligence thrown in, to utterly annihilate your "law of Nature."

One of the schoolboys approaches. The slate-blue jersey flutters like an

Look at him, that boy! What a miracle, that supreme flower, French, Catholic, Roman! Panting, the blood running rapid under the brown skin, and the shoulders already straight, he is all force and all grace, that is to say, all intelligence and all nobleness. I admire you when you put your hand on his shoulder. For my part, I should not dare to touch him. I respect him, and I am afraid. (The boy recedes in the distance.) He smiled, and a soul seem to go out from his smile. It is ancient like our harvests. It has burned on the parapet before the mouths of machineguns. It has stitched the fléche of cathedrals, inflated the joyous plunderers of towns, sighed in the heart of the old Charlemagne when he made his little plaint on Roncevaulx "Dites-lui que je suis en mult grande peine..." It is more ancient than that. It was not born with the howling of lions, behind the rail of the arena; nor when the newborn Enfant put his hand on the brow of Melchoir. It wandered on the lips of the Hermes at the hour when Cicero, after a pause, wrote that the Poor Man is the Messenger of God. Crito, the morning of the hemlock, saw it form like an image on the features of the sleeping Silenus. O my dear Abbé, that soul in desire of being born is in each of the children of our race; it will appear only when you bring it into being. Yes, a burning bush, that is, the apparition of God. But God burning by experience, environed by suffering, in the midst of the flames.

Night has fallen imperceptibly. In the distance, little bluish pools of water burn like bits of broken sky. The odour of damp turf and mud becomes more

landscape heroic. From the clarity of gold to the ruddy tan of brick, all faces carry the colors of flame.

It is night, the grand, fresh night, the night of bodies tired with the ardent weariness of play. Break off the games; tell them it is time to go. (To himself while the Abbé whistles to the players.) Have I really spoken? Have I been understood? My heart was calm when I came under the great trees with my dog. It is so long that my lips have been tightened over the immobility of my heart that a little wound has come, a wound that has never healed. And suddenly I have shivered, and my lips have been opened. O my hunger, my thirst, how long, how long? And how clement you are to me, despite all, in the shadows.

The Abbé (returning.)—They have gone to change their clothing.

The soft thunder of drums. Young conscripts from Mount Valérien drilling on the bank of the river.

I.-I see one receding off there in the violet dust rising toward Suresnes. While the rest assemble, he withdraws farther and farther. Alone, drunk with evening, with the anguish of twilight, he chases the ball with all his force, and when he has caught it, sends it rolling ever farther, and ever pursues, as if condemned to a fabulous punishment which prevents him from stopping, as if goaded by a divine insanity. Where is he going? If I were his father, I would pray for him.

The Abbé.-I can no longer see him.

I. I see two others carrying an iron bar between them. I see their shadows. They walk in step, heavily. They have the air of litter-bearers.

I hang 'mid men my needless head, And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:

The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper

Time shall reap, but after the reaper The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper.

HE man who wrote these lines, "sun

hazed sleeper" though he was, reckoned well in his prophecy. The world has gleaned of him more bountifully perhaps than he looked for, but his reckoning holds; and it is good to see that a man as oblivious as he to the

moil of life about him was yet cognizant of his own contribution to the world. Francis Thompson was more than "sunhazed sleeper", more than mystic, more than poet even, he was child. His is the philosophy of childhood, of innocence. His is the wisdom of the child.

In his essay on Shelley we hear him saying: "Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is

To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death." Completing the period, he says, speaking of Shelley: "To the last in a degree uncommon even among poets, he retained the idiosyncracy of childhood, expand

ed and matured without differentiation. To the last he was the enchanted child."

The same might be said and more pertinently of Thompson: To the last he was the enchanted child. Drunk with dreams and the gorgeous symbols they evoked he lived in a world of his own imagining, that world of faëry so precious to wide eyed childhood. "It is to believe in belief." He truly believed in belief, though surrounded on all sides by sceptics and iconoclasts. "It is to turn lowness into loftiness." In the gutters of London he fashioned the loftiest imagery poet has yet bequeathed to a bewildered world. With his fairy godmother in his soul, living in a nutshell or a sewer, what matter, counting himself king of the infinite, turning nothing into everything, he was the tired, soiled, yet illusioned child-gutter waif, if you will, bare feet in its dregs but eyes to the stars, head totty with heaven.

It is hard to speak of Francis Thompson without growing somewhat ecstatic,