But nature is not solitude; She crowds us with her thronging wood; Her many hands reach out to us, Her many tongues are garrulous; Perpetual riddles of surprise She offers to our ears and eyes.
And so I find it well to come For deeper rest to this still room, For here the habit of the soul Feels less the outer world's control; The strength of mutual purpose pleads More earnestly our common needs; And from the silence multiplied By these still forms on every side, The world that time and sense have known Falls off and leaves us God alone.
For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow wrote a sonnet on _The Three Silences of Molinos_--the silence of speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so much that calls to us in other poets.
It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city that looks over toward England, and more than a generation has passed since his death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three countries--France, Belgium, and Switzerland--were celebrating his centenary with speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his lectures on _Port-Royal_, and had undergone not a little chagrin for his pains, the University unveiled a bronze medallion of his head,--a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned and complex, writes a Parisian journalist, with immoderate forehead radiating a cold serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile at once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an Erasmus grown fat, with a reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask of the face. It is evidently the "Père Beuve" as we know him in the portraits, and it is not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken hack and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris.
Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself feared by the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been a good deal of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old anecdotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je suis du peuple ainsi que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work; and when that work was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to draw a hat down over his face (that face _dont le front démesurément haut rayonne de sérénité froide_), and go out on the street for any chance liaison. There is something too much of these stories in what is written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual career too little emphasis is laid on what was stable in his opinions, and too much emphasis on the changes of his religious and literary creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are commonly cited as his preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense this is right. But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the value of this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic, and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a title, the _maître universel_ of the century, as, indeed, he has been called.