ain's top,
Where the birds dare not build--nor insects wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along
On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave
Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow."

The island of Guernsey was Gilliatt's Alp and sea-solitude, where he,
too, had his avalanches waiting to fall "like foam from the round ocean
of old Hell." And as Byron figured his own revolt against the bonds in
Manfred, so Hugo, being in exile, put himself with lyrical and
rhetorical impetuosity into the island marcou and child of destiny that
he concocted with "a little sand and a little blood and a deal of
fantasy" in the years 1864 and 1865. There is a familiar glimpse of the
Hugo household to be had in the first winter of its transference to the
Channel Islands, years before _Les Travailleurs_ was written, which
betrays the mood from which finally sprang this concrete fable of the
man-at-odds. It was the end of November 1852, and a father and his
younger son sat in a room of a house of Marine Terrace, Jersey--a plain,
unpicturesque house; square, hard in outline, and newly
whitewashed,--Methodism, said Hugo, in stones and mortar. Outside its
windows the rain fell and the wind blew: the house was like a thing
benumbed by the angry noise. The two inmates sat plunged in thought,
possibly thinking of the sad significance of these beginnings of winter
and of exile which had arrived together. At length the son (Francois
Hugo) asked the father what he meant to do during their exile, which he
had already predicted would be long? The father said, "I shall look at
the sea." Then came a silence, broken by a question as to what the son
would do? To which he replied that he would translate Shakespeare.

Victor Hugo's own study or eulogy of Shakespeare was written as a
preamble to his son's translation of the plays. It is not too much to
connect the new and ample creative work that followed, including his
great novel of Revolution, _Les Miserables_, and his poems in _La
Legende des Siecles_ (first series) with the double artistic stimulus
gained from this conditioned solitude and his closer acquaintance with
the dramatic mind of that "giant of the great art of the ages," as he
termed our English poet in the book already quoted from.

The Shakespeare book is dated from Hauteville House, 1864. _Les
Travailleurs_ from the same quarters, March 1866. The Hugos had perforce
suddenly le