amed, alas! and
ordered, as must be the violence of over-human things:--

Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule Science
Qui nous met en repos.

EXTRACTS.

(_From the "Ode to Louis XIII setting out against La Rochelle,"
and the "Sonnet on his son's death."_)

It has been remarked that Malherbe in his most vigorous years
deliberately employed the strength of his mind to the repression of
emotion in his verse, and used it only to fashion, guide, control, and
at last fix permanently the rules of the language. It is certainly true
that as his bodily vigour declined, a certain unexpected anger and
violence enters into his verse, to the great relief of us moderns: not
to that of his contemporaries.

Of this feature in him, the two following extracts are sufficient proof.
They were written, the first at the close of his seventy-second, the
other at the entry of his seventy-third year. In each, something close
to his heart was at issue, and in each he gives some vent--far more than
had been his wont--to passion.

The first is a cry to Louis XIII to have done with the Huguenot. It was
written to the camp before La Rochelle. I know of nothing in French
literature which more expresses the intense current of national feeling
against the nobility and rich townsmen who had attempted to warp the
national tradition and who had re-introduced into French life the
element which France works perpetually to throw out as un-European,
ill-cultured and evil. Indeed, the reading of it is of more value to the
comprehension of the national attitude than any set history you may
read.

The second is in its way a thing equally religious and equally catholic.
This call for vengeance to God was not only an expression of anger
called forth by his son's death, it was also, and very largely, the
effect of a reaction against the ethics of Geneva: an attack on the
idolatry at once of meekness and of fatality which was to him so
intolerable a corruption of the Christian religion.

There is some doubt as to whether it is his last work. I believe it to
be so; but Blaise, in his excellent edition, prints the dull and
unreadable ode to Lagade later, and ascribes it to the same year.

_ODE TO LOUIS XIII._

_Fais choir en sacrifice au demon de la France
Les fronts trop eleves de ces ames d'enfer;
Et n'epargne contre eux, pour notre delivran