looking out of the window of his
study.' The accusation gains support from the fact that Racine rarely
describes the processes of nature by means of pictorial detail; that, we
know, was not his plan. But he is constantly, with his subtle art,
suggesting them. In this line, for instance, he calls up, without a word
of definite description, the vision of a sudden and brilliant sunrise:

Deja le jour plus grand nous frappe et nous eclaire.

And how varied and beautiful are his impressions of the sea! He can give
us the desolation of a calm:

La rame inutile
Fatigua vainement une mer immobile;

or the agitated movements of a great fleet of galleys:

Voyez tout l'Hellespont blanchissant sous nos rames;

or he can fill his verses with the disorder and the fury of a storm:

Quoi! pour noyer les Grecs et leurs mille vaisseaux,
Mer, tu n'ouvriras pas des abymes nouveaux!
Quoi! lorsque les chassant du port qui les recele,
L'Aulide aura vomi leur flotte criminelle,
Les vents, les memes vents, si longtemps accuses,
Ne te couvriront pas de ses vaisseaux brises!

And then, in a single line, he can evoke the radiant spectacle of a
triumphant flotilla riding the dancing waves:

Prets a vous recevoir mes vaisseaux vous attendent;
Et du pied de l'autel vous y pouvez monter,
Souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter.

The art of subtle suggestion could hardly go further than in this line,
where the alliterating v's, the mute e's, and the placing of the long
syllables combine so wonderfully to produce the required effect.

But it is not only suggestions of nature that readers like Mr. Bailey
are unable to find in Racine--they miss in him no less suggestions of
the mysterious and the infinite. No doubt this is partly due to our
English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are
complex and unfamiliar. When we come across the mysterious accent of
fatality and remote terror in a single perfectly simple phrase--

La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae

we are apt not to hear that it is there. But there is another
reason--the craving, which has seized upon our poetry and our criticism
ever since the triumph of Wordsworth and Coleridge at the beginning of
the last century, for metaphysical stimulants. It would be easy to
prolong the discussion of this matter far beyond the boundaries of
'sublunary debate,' but it is sufficient to point o