"
This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing
the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the
journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already
spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the
soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming,
of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not
shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which
attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which
comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion of
his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is
written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly
revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus
endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up
to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."
Among the noble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments the
piety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to select
one name rather than another.
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