Essays in Criticism

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MAURICE DE GUERIN. WILL not presume to say that I now know the French language well; but at a time when I knew it even less well than at present, ? some fifteen years ago, ? I remember pestering those about me with this sentence, the rhythm of which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with the...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MAURICE DE GUERIN. WILL not presume to say that I now know the French language well; but at a time when I knew it even less well than at present, ? some fifteen years ago, ? I remember pestering those about me with this sentence, the rhythm of which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with the strangest pronunciation possible, I kept perpetually declaiming: Les dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part les te'moignages de la descendance des choses; mais au bord de quel Oce'an ont ils route' la pierre qui les couvre, 6 Macare'e These words come from a short composition called the Centaur, of which the author, Georges-Maurice de Gue'rin, died in the year 1839, at the age of twenty-eight, without having published anything. In 1840, Madame Sand brought out the Centaur in the Revue des Deux Mondes, with a short notice of its author, and a few extracts from his letters. A year or two afterwards she reprinted these at the end of a volume of her novels; and there it was that I fell in with them. I was so much struck with the Centaur that I waited anxiously to hear something more of its author, and of what he had left; but it was not till the other day ? twenty years after the first publication of the Centaur in the Revue des Deux Mondes ? that my anxiety was satisfied. At the end of 1860 appeared two volumes with the title, Maurice de Guerin, Reliquice, containing the Centaur, several poems of Gue'rin, his journals, and a number of his letters, collected and edited by a devoted friend, M. Trebutien, and preceded by a notice of Guerin by the first of living critics, M. Sainte-Beuve. The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with...