of arms, his tenacity of
perception, Racan gives us in his biography an admirable picture. Just
before he died his son was killed in a duel--he, at seventy-two, desired
passionately to kill the adversary. "Gambling," he said, "my pence of
life against the gold of his twenty-five years." He had wit, and he
hated well--hating men after death:

Here richly with ridiculous display
Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away,
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

His zeal for his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making
his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say
something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from
the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His
confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are
relevant!" he answered, sinking back. "I will defend with my last breath
the purity and grandeur of the French tongue."

To such a man the meaning of the solution at which his people had
arrived after a century of civil war lay, above all, in their ancient
religion. On that converged those deeper and more permanent things in
his soul of which even his patriotism and his literary zeal were but the
surface. In the expression of that final solution his verse, which was
hardly that of a poet, rises high into poetry; under the heat and
pressure of his faith, single lines here and there have crystallized
into diamonds. By far the most vigorous of so many frigid odes is the
battle cry addressed by him in old age to Louis XIII setting out against
La Rochelle. He visited that siege, but had the misfortune to die a bare
week before the fall of the city. The most powerful of his sonnets, or
rather the only powerful one, is that in which he calls to Our Lord for
vengeance against the men who killed his son. Catholicism in its every
effect, political and personal, as it were literary too, possessed the
man, so that in ending the types of the French Renaissance with him you
see how the terms in which ultimately the French express themselves are
and will remain religious. The last two lines of his most famous and
most Catholic poem have about them just that sound which saves them, in
spite of their too simple words, from falling into the vulgar
commonplace of vague and creedless men. In writing them down one seems
to be writing down the fate of the great century now t