And at this lovely hour, And her sad record keeps. How many days, how many years, A lingering age of sighs and tears,— Yet in that guarded tower she lays her head, And who the warder of that place of sighs? Her husband! he the dragon-watch supplies. What words are those which meet her anxious ear? Lamps flickering round, and wailings sad and low, And Laila marks the moon: a cloud Had stained its lucid face; The mournful token of a shroud, Her husband's hand and heart are cold. Were for her own Majnun, and not the dead! [In after life the two lovers meet but for a moment of enchanting rapture, and an instant for interchanging mutual vows of devotion; when the woe-worn Majnun and the unhappy Laila are separated forever, to be united only in death. Legend tells us how Laila's faithful page beheld a vision of the beatified lovers joined in Paradise.] glorious The minstrel's legend chronicle And how their dust was mixed in death, Tells how the sorrow-stricken Zeyd Beneath a palm's extensive shade, Studded with glittering gems and gold; Close where a lucid streamlet strayed: They held a cup, with diamonds bright; Sometimes to each their thoughts revealing, The dreamer who this vision saw A voice replied: "That sparkling moon Translation of James Atkinson. CHARLES NODIER (1780-1844) SURING the French Revolution, the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, an offshoot of the Paris Jacobins, sprang up at Besançon. M. Nodier, ex-mayor, and during the Terror a sad but inexorable public accuser, was one of its leaders. His son Charles, who was born at Besançon, April 28th, 1780, used to accompany his father to the meetings of the society, of which he became a member; and when he was twelve years old made his seniors an eloquent address full of republican principles. These he always CHARLES NODIER retained, whether grumbling wittily at king, consul, or emperor, as was his way. His studies of political events in the Souvenirs are more entertaining than reliable. He was not an active politician; but his youthful expression of opinion, by embroiling him with the authorities, influenced his whole career. About 1802 a satiric ode, Napoléone,' prompted by the proscription of the consulate, attracted attention. To rescue others from suspicion, Nodier boldly admitted its authorship. What followed is difficult to determine, as he and his friends bewail his sufferings, and others pronounce them a fabrication. He spent several years in exile, wandering through the Vosges mountains. During this time he made the friendship of Benjamin Constant, and also saw much of Madame de Staël, who may have inspired his love of German literature. German mysticism appealed strongly to his fanciful spirit, as did the rich folklore of Germany. Imaginative, a lover of nature, his early works'Les Meditations du Cloître,' 'Le Peintre de Salzburg,' 'Le Solitaire des Vosges,' 'Stella, ou les Proscrits'-express a quite Byronic selfindulgence in woe, with a tinge of Rousseau-like sentimentality. His Dictionnaire des Onomatopées Françaises' (1808) was an ingenious effort to establish the origin of languages from imitation of natural sounds. This many-sided Charles Nodier was perhaps primarily a scientist. He looked at life with microscopic eyes, and loved minute investigation. As a boy in his native town, his much older friend Chantras had aroused his interest in natural history; and his first work was a 'Dissertation upon the Functions of Antennæ in Insects.' He is said to have discovered the organ of hearing in insects. Now, just the fascination he found in a butterfly's wing or a beetle's nippers, he found too in the study of language. To find and fit the exact word gave him exquisite pleasure. Of all things he detested easy banality; and whatever he wrote had a piquant novelty of phrase which never seemed forced. This sweet-natured lover of fairies was familiar with the classics and foreign literature, erudite in the structure and usage of his mother tongue. In the mastery of words, which makes his style as "flexible as water," he is a classicist. "Boileau would have admired him," says a critic; and in his respect for form he belongs to the old régime. But he was modern too. His sympathies were not only for world-wide, world-old experience. His fancy wandered off into side tracks; and sought the bizarre, the exceptional, the mysterious. He admitted the personal element in art; wanted to express himself, Charles Nodier; and thus is a forerunner of romanticism. It is a pity that his successors forgot his lesson of moderation in inartistic excesses; for literary instinct kept his own venturesome spontaneity always within the domain of good taste. The slender white-browed man with his piercing eyes, his childlike enthusiasms, worked his way gradually to fame. In 1823 he was appointed librarian at the library of the Arsénal in Paris; where for more than twenty years, until his death in 1844, his salon was "a little Tuileries for young writers and the new school." Here Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Dumas fils, De Musset, De Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and many another young man with fame before him, listened respectfully to the Academician, the critic and teller of tales. Sainte-Beuve describes his lovable presence, his fascinating converse in which witty irony was so veiled with tact as never to wound. One day a young friend brought him a manuscript in which he had consciously tried to imitate the master's style. "My dear boy," said Nodier, "what you have brought me cannot be very good, for at first I thought it must be mine." Nodier was a poet. He loved what he calls "the Muse of the Ideal, the elegant sumptuous daughter of Asia, who long ago took refuge under the fogs of Great Britain." His small volume of lyric verse, published in 1827, has a melody and suggestive freakish grace which make one wish it larger. His stories are his best-known work, and in fiction his gifts are many. There is a lofty sentiment in his more introspective sketches which suggests Lamartine. In some moods he delights in elfland dream goblins, kindly fays-as in 'Trilby, le Lutin d'Argaile,' 'La XVIII-668 Fée aux Miettes,' Trésor des Fèves et Fleur des Pois,' 'Les Quatre Talismans. Sometimes he is akin to Hoffmann in his expression of psychologic mystery, in his eery enchantment. Of this, 'Smana, or the Demons of Night' is a good example. He is a mocker too; and in stories like 'Les Marionettes,' 'The King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles,' he satirizes with sparkling irony both himself and the world. A THE GOLDEN DREAM THE KARDOUON S ALL the world knows, the Kardouon is the prettiest, the cleverest, and the most courteous of lizards. The Kardouon dresses in gold like a great lord, but he is shy and modest; and from his solitary secluded life people think him a scholar. The Kardouon has never done ill to any one, and every one loves the Kardouon. The young girls are proud when, as they pass, he gazes upon them with love and joy, erecting his neck of iridescent blue and ruby between the fissures of an old wall, or sparkling in the sunshine with countless reflections from the marvelous tissue in which he is clad. They say to each other: "It was I, not you, whom he looked at to-day. He thought me the prettiest, and I'll be his love." The Kardouon thinks nothing of the kind. He is looking about for good roots to feast his comrades, and to enjoy with them at his leisure on a sparkling stone in the full noontide heat. One day the Kardouon found in the desert a treasure composed of bright new coins, so pretty and polished that they seemed to have just bounded out with a groan from under the measure. A fugitive king had left them there so that he could go faster. "Goodness of God!" said the Kardouon. "Here, if I'm not much mistaken, is a precious provision just right for the winter. It's nothing less than slices of that fresh sugary carrot which always revives my spirits when solitude wearies me, and the most appetizing I ever have seen." And the Kardouon glided toward the treasure-not directly, for that is not his way, but winding about prudently; now with head raised, nose in the air, his whole body in a straight line, his tail vertical like a stake; then pausing undecided, inclining first one eye then the other toward the ground, to listen with |