To our forefathers time was more lenient than it is to us. Somehow the days and the nights were longer, and the old-time reader appeared to find more leisure and a brighter oil with which to pursue his literary browsings and point his antitheses. “There is a certain want of ease about the old writers,” Alexander Smith remarks (and I recall no one who has expressed it so musically before), “which has an irresistible charm. The language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil—the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to the surface and breaking the whole into babbling music.”
“When I looked into one of these old volumes,” Thoreau characteristically says, “it affected me like looking into an inaccessible swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bull-frogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
In this age of hurry and concentration who has the time to wade through the hundred volumes of Voltaire? It is even a task to go through his anthology, Élite de Poésies Fugitives, in the pretty little two-volume Cazin edition, there are so many more shells than pearls. But one’s time is well repaid after all, if only for the sake of finding and holding one such exquisite bit of airy verse as M. Bernard’s Le Hameau. Is it original, or a translation? The German poet Gottfried Bürger’s Das Doerfchen and this are one and the same, except that the latter is somewhat condensed, though equally beautiful. Following M. Bernard’s idyl is a panegyric in verse by Voltaire addressed to M. Berger, “who sent him the preceding stanzas,” Voltaire’s tribute beginning:
De ton Bernard
J’aime l’esprit.
C’est la peinture
De la nature.
Bernard, Berger, and Bürger; or Bürger, Berger, and Bernard would at first sight seem to be in a tangle. But in rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s,
I praise my dear
Sweet village here,