all that the mind has treasured must be
bathed in the greatness of soul, lest it perish in the sandy desert,
forlorn as the river that seeks in vain for the sea." But for
unnecessary self-sacrifice, renouncement, abandonment of earthly joys,
and all such "parasitic virtues," he has no commendation or approval;
feeling that man was created to be happy, and that he is not wise who
voluntarily discards a happiness to-day for fear lest it be taken from
him on the morrow. "Let us wait till the hour of sacrifice sounds--till
then, each man to his work. The hour will sound at last--let us not
waste our time in seeking it on the dial of life."

In this book, morality, conduct, life are Surveyed from every point of
the compass, but from an eminence always. Austerity holds no place in
his philosophy; he finds room even "for the hours that babble aloud in
their wantonness." But all those who follow him are led by smiling
wisdom to the heights where happiness sits enthroned between goodness
and love, where virtue rewards itself in the "silence that is the
walled garden of its happiness."

It is strange to turn from this essay to Serres Chaudes and La
Princesse Maleine, M. Maeterlinck's earliest efforts--the one a
collection of vague images woven into poetical form, charming, dreamy,
and almost meaningless; the other a youthful and very remarkable effort
at imitation. In the plays that followed the Princesse Maleine there
was the same curious, wandering sense of, and search for, a vague and
mystic beauty: "That fair beauty which no eye can see, Of that sweet
music which no ear can measure." In a little poem of his, Et s'il
revenait, the last words of a dying girl, forsaken by her lover, who is
asked by her sister what shall be told to the faithless one, should he
ever seek to know of her last hours:

"Et s'il m'interroge encore
Sur la derniere heure?--
Dites lui que j'ai souri
De peur qu'il ne pleure ..."

touch, perhaps, the very high-water mark of exquisite simplicity and
tenderness blent with matchless beauty of expression. Pelleas et
Melisande was the culminating point of this, his first, period--a
simple, pathetic love-story of boy and girl--love that was pure and
almost passionless. It was followed by three little plays--"for
marionettes," he describes them on the title-page; among them being La
Mort de Tintagiles, the play he himself prefers of all that he has
written. And then came a curious change: he wrot