! be wary, take heed, lest aught should be seen or heard
Of the shining seraph band, as they take the heavenward way;
Too soon the Angel on Earth will learn the magical word
Sung at the close of the day.

Then you shall see afar, rifting the darkness of night,
A gleam as of dawn that spread across the starry floor,
And the seaman that watch for a sign shall mark the track of their flight,
A luminous pathway in Heaven and a beacon for evermore.

"Do you read the riddle?" said Amelie, giving M. du Chatelet a
coquettish glance.

"It is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we
left school," said the Baron with a bored expression--he was acting his
part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal in
Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors
who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads. Nowadays this
poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the
plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened
up with a few new words such as 'immense, infinite, solitude,
intelligence'; you have lakes, and the words of the Almighty, a kind
of Christianized Pantheism, enriched with the most extraordinary and
unheard-of rhymes. We are in quite another latitude, in fact; we have
left the North for the East, but the darkness is just as thick as
before."

"If the ode is obscure, the declaration is very clear, it seems to me,"
said Zephirine.

"And the archangel's armor is a tolerably thin gauze robe," said
Francis.

Politeness demanded that the audience should profess to be enchanted
with the poem; and the women, furious because they had no poets in
their train to extol them as angels, rose, looked bored by the reading,
murmuring, "Very nice!" "Charming!" "Perfect!" with frigid coldness.

"If you love me, do not congratulate the poet or his angel," Lolotte
laid her commands on her dear Adrien in imperious tones, and Adrien was
fain to obey.

"Empty words, after all," Zephirine remarked to Francis, "and love is a
poem that we live."

"You have just expressed the very thing that I was thinking, Zizine, but
I should not have put it so neatly," said Stanislas, scanning himself
from top to toe with loving attention.

"I would give, I don't know how much, to see Nais' pride brought down
a bit," said Amelie, addressing Chatelet. "Nais sets up to be an
archangel, as if she were bett