IMOGEN. (A LADY OF TENDER AGE.) Ladies, where were your bright eyes glancing, Where were they glancing yesternight? Saw ye Imogen dancing, dancing, Imogen dancing all in white? Laughed she not with a pure delight, Laughed she not with a joy serene, Stepped she not with a grace entrancing, Slenderly girt in silken sheen? All through the night from dusk to daytime Under her feet the hours were swift, Ladies, life is a changing measure, Longman's Magazine. HENRY NEWBOLT. THE SKYLARK. Two worlds hast thou to dwell in, Sweet,- And this vexed region at my feet,- To all my songs there clings the shade, Thine, in immortal air. My heart is dashed with griefs and fears, Not loftiest bard of mightiest mind, AD CINERARIUM. Who in this small urn reposes― Celt or Roman, man or woman, Steel of steel or rose of roses? Whose the dust set rustling slightly, In its hiding-place abiding, When this urn is lifted lightly? Sure some mourner deemed immortal What thou holdest and enfoldest, Little house without a portal! VICTOR PLARR. THE BALLADE OF BRAVE MEN. The sailors of sunken ships, There, where the schoolboy strips- You made many perilous trips; With the canvas torn to strips, Before the gale you flew; No more the wild wind whipsBrave men, there is rest for you. A song for the men too few For nature so few equips- That only a brave man sips. No longer the cold spray dripsBrave men, there is rest for you. WILLIAM S. LORD. PSALM XXV. 15. I ask not for Thy love, O Lord: the days Can never come when anguish shall atone. Enough for me were but Thy pity shown To me as to the stricken sheep that strays, With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways. Oh, lead me back to pastures I have known, Or find me in the wilderness alone, I ask not for Thy love, nor e'en so much Compassion as may melt to such a cry; That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch, And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die. G. J. ROMANES. From The Revue des Deux Mondés. ALL SOULS' EVE IN LOWER BRITTANY. "La terre de la Patrie de quoi serait -elle faite Sinon de ceux qui y sont enterrés ?" "If you want to see a regular nuit des morts you should come and spend AllSaints with us in the mountains. We are not so keen for novelty as they are down on the coast. They have abandoned all the old customs, but we keep them up. You come and see! It's worth while." It was the pillawer, as they call him in the Bréton tongue,—that is, the itinerant rag-man, who spoke thus. He and I have the same name, and he considers that we are somehow related. It may very well be that our ancestors belonged to the same clan. At all events he never fails, when making his rounds to pay me a short visit. He is an excellent man, and for all the rusticity of his aspect, he knows perfectly what he is about. On this occasion he went on to say: "I live in Spézet, when I live anywhere. It's not a pretty village, and the country is considered rather wild. Life is hard there. You eat your bread, not merely in the sweat of your brow, as the Book says, but in the sweat of all your limbs. The story goes that Wealth and Poverty started for Brittany together, but Wealth went down by the shore, while Poverty kept up among the hills. Oh yes, we are poor. God meant we should be. The best we can do for our dead, is to offer them a little brown bread and bacon. and a glass of milk. But they always find the table spread when the hour comes for that meal to which they have a right, once a year. It's not so with you rich folks down on the coast. The hill-country is the place, I tell you! You have money, but we have religion. You come to Spézet! My wife keeps a little inn, and you shall be our guest. Hempen sheets and corn bread smell so good! And then, you see, it is only up in the mountains, that All-Souls' Eve is still kept as it should be." I. November. They call it the black month. The delicate blue tints which bathed the horizon in the bright days of early autumn begin to fade and darken; and as the fogs grow more dense, a melancholy greyness, vague at first but soon becoming fixed and permanent, silently envelops the entire landscape. I know few things more impressive than the road from Quimper to Spézet over the Montagne-Noire in the black month. A keen wind smites you in the face, the moment you are outside the suburbs of the town; still, so long as you are skirting the red hills, and the valleys with their lingering tints of yellowish green, something of the gaiety of prosperous Cornouailles stays with you. Then, suddenly, you begin the climb into a very different sort of country; you seem to be ascending, step by step, a vast and sombre staircase. On either side of you, the land lies waste, a stern, colorless funereal desert. Few trees or none -a sickly dwarf oak or two, twisted and deformed-an occasional group of pines, moaning audibly, as it would seem, over the surrounding desolation. In all the pass, there is not one of those rural inns, those licensed victuallers with a bunch of mistletoe or a bough of laurel hung out by way of sign, which you find scattered along the waysides everywhere else in Brittany. The carriers fight shy of these solitudes, yet the road is wide, and here and there it recalls the forlorn majesty of certain avenues in the neighborhood of Versailles. It might be made out of the illjoined sections of some ancient Roman way. After passing Briec,—the capital of the canton, a town whose administrative importance is emphasized to the passer-by, chiefly by the zinc flag over the police-station, squeaking in the wind like a rusty vane, you plunge at once into the true Ménez-or wild mountain country. It is an inhospitable region, haunted by legends which are little calculated to reassure the mind. The famous woman-bandit, Marion du Faouët, whose name is never mentioned with The Bretons have a striking name for out a shudder even now, practised her abominations here in the eighteenth aspect of an immense pre-historic century. In the cry of the osprey, the cemetery. mountaineers think they hear the shriek of her whistle, "which was so sharp that it pierced the traveller's soul, and so loud that it brought the leaves off the trees." Her ghost continues to pervade the region, riding on stormy nights a beast of darkness whose hoofs make no noise, but only leave streaks of blood along the ground. The very names of the places call up sinister images, and the only hamlet in all this desert-such a pitiful one!-is named Laz, which means murder. A local proverb offers the following advice to travellers in the mountains: "When you leave Briec cross yourself. When you turn off toward Laz invoke your guardian angel." For if brigands are no longer to be feared one is still exposed to the ill-offices of those spirits inimical to man, who hold undisputed sway over these inviolate altitudes. The popular memory is inexhaustible, as regards the nasty tricks which have been played by the uncanny folk upon inoffensive wayfarers. They shut you up in enchanted rings. They unroll before you magic footpaths, where you may go on and on forever-walking as it were, in your sleep and never waking. It is evident therefore that, in spite of its apparent loneliness, the Ménez is only too densely inhabited. And I have not said a word about the genuine ghosts, who are as thick there as heather and rushes. It is, in fact, a sort of terrestrial annex to purgatory, a place of probation and penitence for disembodied souls. The rather monumental aspect of the crests of black schist which bristle along the hilltops, may have had its part, I fancy, in inducing this belief. The eye is caught on every side, by rocky ridges, and pyramidal piles of stones, which remind one strongly of the burial-places of barbaric times. Here and there, as far as the eye can reach, huge mysterious cairns may be discerned set in rows along the horizon, and the whole country does in fact present the Communication with Spézet is rare and not easy. On the advice of my friend the rag-man whose name is Ronan Le Braz, I had availed myself of a carrier's wagon which had gone down the night before, to the market at Quimper, and was returning to the mountains laden with all sorts of merchandise. I had perched myself upon the top of this miscellaneous mass, and my position if not precisely comfortable was a good one for observation. My conductress, for the carrier was a woman, sat on one of the shafts, with her legs hanging, and exchanged a few words from time to time, now with the sorry nag who composed her entire team, and now with myself. She was a great wild-looking creature, almost a giantess. On her head, which was too small for her body, she wore a little flat cap, and her rough speech was decidedly masculine. Perfectly acquainted with the peculiarities of the route which she travelled from fifteen to twenty times a year, she instructed me concerning them, as occasion arose, in curt terms, interrupted by the oaths which she addressed to her beast. Absorbed in that setting of sombre legend, I let the conversation drop, as we drew near to Laz, and we proceeded for some time in silence. My companion even ceased to abuse her nag, whose pace slackened while his bells tinkled more feebly. Moreover we were rounding a grassy coomb, upon a very steep incline, and loaded as we were, it would have been imprudent to hurry. Relieved from the shock of incessant jolting, I could admire at my ease, the weird and spectral aspect worn in the early dusk by the colossal masses of distorted schist, lifting their grinning profiles in silhouette against the low-hung sky. All at once in obedience to some myste rious impulse, the woman began to hum disconnected fragments of some rustic lament. Her voice, muffled at first. rose, little by little, to a powerful and piercing pitch; and I shall never forget the strange impression I received as I heard soaring into the twilight and reechoed from afar, across the vast sepulchral country-that strong, hoarse monody-that wild incantation fraught with a sort of tragic grandeur. The stony shapes of the Ménez seemed bending their ears to listen, and shudderings of awe and mystery passed over the landscape below. A solitary voice at night, always makes the general silence more impressive. was on the watch for me, standing on the threshold of his cottage and holding a lighted candle. "Here you are at last, cousin!" he exclaimed with an air of mischievous good-fellowship, peculiar to himself; and drew me toward the fireplace where the evening meal was cooking over a fire of blazing furze, while his wife kept up the conflagration by incessantly pushing in more of the "Are you afraid, that you sing so thorny branches with a small iron fork. loud?" I asked the woman. He proceeded formally to introduce "Afraid? No. These places know me well enough! But haven't you heard little rustling noises, when there was nobody in sight? It's the saying among us that, on the eve of their anniversary, the dead are hurrying along all the roads, to the places where they used to live. And you know, of course, that they don't like to meet living people. So I sing, just to let them know that I am here." Night had now fallen, and the woman lighted a tin lamp, or lantern with a conical top, and fastened it to one of the steps of the cart. It added not a little to the weirdness of our progress to see the shadow of the horse assuming by that fitful light, the proportions of a beast of the Apocalypse. All at once, from somewhere on our right a churchbell began ringing, with a tinkling, timorous tone. We had arrived at Spézet. II. I have never seen a Bréton village. which impressed one at first sight, with a stronger sense of that disdain of material advantages (that is to say, of all which comes under the modern heads of comfort and hygiene) which is professed by all Celtic races-the Gauls only excepted. The dateless dwellings are in a miserably ruinous and tumbledown condition. Dung-heaps fester at the doors; while within a few absolutely indispensable articles of furniture moulder along the walls and ine floor is of hard-trodden earth. I inquired my way to the inn of Ronan Le Braz, but he had heard the noise of the cart, and us: "Gäida, this is the gentleman I told you about: the one who makes people teil him the country legends; and then he repeats them to the folks in France." "Good," said Gäida, lifting up a beaming face, "You have come at the right minute for we have old Nann here to-night. She has not lived in the parish for thirty years, but all her dead are buried here, and she is back, just now of course, on their account. She is at vespers at this moment, but-" "By the way," said Ronan, "wouldn't you like to go yourself to the 'black vespers?" "By all means!" and we started forthwith for the church, which we could see dimly lighted, and looming in the midst of the burying-ground on the other side of the square. A flight of broken stone steps led to the porch, and I was struck the instant I entered, by that humid chill which pervades all the old Armorican sanctuaries, with their walls bespotted with saltpetre and stained with green moss, they look as though they might be submarine chapels, long drowned, and only just brought to light. In the middle of the nave stood the catafalque, or, as they call it in Brittany the funeral-stool, bearing upon one side a translation into the local dialect of the Latin motto Hodie mihi cras tibi. It was surrounded by women, crouching rather than kneeling, while the men gathered in the sideaisles, barely distinguishable by the dim light of the tallow candles fastened at intervals to the pillars. When the priest had pronounced the absolution the men and women began to intone together a Bréton canticle of infinite sadness, breathing a pessimism at once unaffected and poignant. It was all about the brevity of human existence, its rare joys and manifold woes; how small a thing it is to live; how happy to die. It praised the dead for having done with all this, and paid their debt to destiny. To this chant succeeded the prayer of the whole congregation, after which they dispersed, to prostrate themselves in the cemetery on the graves of their own people. Poor miserable monuments they were, in most cases a mere slab of slate-stone rudely squared but invariably furnished with the little stone cup for holy-water, where friends and kindred piously dip their fingers every Sunday when they come out from mass. and with a deeply religious accent. After each strophe the old woman paused, and there arose from the people present a confused murmur of: "God pardon the Anaon," that is the departed souls. Most of the women were telling their beads with one hand, while they held, with the other, on a level with their faces, tiny wax tapers which lit up the fog in that corner of the cemetery, with a pensive illumination, like that of misty moonshine. "The woman who led the prayer," said Ronan in my ear, "was Nann-Nann Coadélez; the one who knows so many stories and is lodging with us to-night. III. I found her at the inn sitting in the chimney-corner, in one of the highbacked oaken chairs carved with bar "And now," whispered Ronan, "we'll baric hieroglyphics, which are peculiar go to the charnel-house." A large part of the crowd had already preceded us. Through the door, which was opened for the occasion, and beyond the iron bars of the unglazed window-spaces the eye discerned a confused heap of decaying skulls, and white, phosphorescent bones. Two of the skulls were set up on the windowledge, and seemed to regard the intruders fixedly out of their vacant eyes. We knelt down in the grass, like the others, while an aged crone, almost as colorless under her hooded mourningcloak as the human débris which encumbered the ossuary, recited aloud in a broken voice one of the most thrilling hymns of the Bréton liturgy, the charnel-house hymn. "Come Christians and look upon all that is left of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and our dearest friends. How pitiful the state to which they have fallen!" "They are in fragments, they are in morsels; of some there is naught left but dust. This is what death and burial have brought them to. They are ail like one to another. They are like themselves no more." to the country. The firelight threw into high relief her stern, sibylline features. She had flung aside her mourningcloak, but her head was still muffled in a black woollen hood, the flaps of which fluttered over her shoulders with every breath of wind let in by the opening door, like the wings of some illomened crow, just poised for flight. With her hooked nose and burning eyes, her dry and sunken mouth and the bitter curve of her lips, she had an almost Dantesque expression, nor did it surprise me in the least when our hostess said to her, quite simply, and without a touch of mockery: "It's true, old Nanna, is it not? that you went once to purgatory, and that there has been a burning smell about you ever since?" "Pray God," replied the crone haughtily, "that you may one day be admitted there yourself, in spite of your sins!" and drawing from the pocket of her apron a small clay pipe, she packed it slowly and then began smoking with short, regular puffs. The inn now filled with people, mostly men with rude, clean-shaven faces, and frank, child-like eyes. They drew up in It is Villon's ballad minus the irony. a line before the desk as they came in, |