from Bergerac. This flattering news may be even pleasant to the generous dying poet, who admits that

Molière a du génie, et Christian était beau!

Then at last, too late, Roxane cries

Je vous aime; vivez!

Cyrano has uncovered, and the still noble head is seen wrapped in bandages. He begs Roxane, when mourning for Christian, to mourn a little for him; and his love replies—

Je vous jure !

as well she may. He will not die sitting, and struggling to his feet, and resting his back against a tree, cries

Ne me soutenez pas ! Personne! Rien que l'arbre.

Je l'attendrai debout (Il tire l'épée),

and the great swordsman will die sword in hand. He tries to impress the air with his keen blade as he strikes at his old enemies, le Mensonge, les Compromis, les Préjugés, les Lâchetés, la Sottise. He makes a terrible moulinet with his sword, and cries, with dying voice

Il y a, malgré vous, quelque chose

Que j'emporte, et ce soir, quand j'entrerai chez Dieu,

Mon salut balaiera largement le seuil bleu,

Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache-et c'est

(L'épée s'échappe de ses mains; il chancelle, tombe dans les bras de

Le Bret et Ragueneau.)

ROXANE (leaning over him and kissing his forehead). C'est ?

CYRANO (ouvre les yeux, la reconnaît et dit en souriant) Mon panache.

And, indeed, his plume, or crest, had never been lowered, and his honour had never been stained. Cyrano was a kind of chivalrous saint, of clearest honour, and a most terrible and gallant swordsman. He was also poet, gentilhomme, and an incomparable lover.

M. Rostand could not, of course, let his matchless swordsman perish by the sword, but yet we feel, with a kind of tender resentment, that a coup de bûche is an undignified method of assassination for such a cavalier. The object clearly was to kill Cyrano by a means which, though certainly fatal in the end, would yet work so slowly that it would give him time for a last scene; and this end could, perhaps, have been better attained by a gunshot wound.

We feel sometimes that the long, persistent blindness of poor Roxane is scarcely credible. A woman-and such a woman-must have discerned the passion in Cyrano's lofty heart; must have

detected the invaluable help rendered to Christian. It is true that M. Rostand has ingeniously hidden, so far as possible, the assistance rendered by Cyrano; but a woman's fine intuition is not so easily deceived, and we must doubt whether his duplicity would be more effective than her insight.

The ideal Cyrano worships only his one goddess; never descends to baser or stoops to lighter loves. He is capable of perfect and self-denying reverence for woman; and, as is the case only with rare spirits, love with Cyrano has so smitten the chord of self that it has passed in music out of sight. He has overcome self-a conquest how hard and how glorious !—but he is so much the victim of his exalted altruism that we are at times led to fancy that, despite Rostand's art, such self-sacrifice, even from such a royal gentleman, is almost exaggeration, is all but incredible.

If only Roxane could have read his heart she would surely, especially after her widowhood, not have refused him his well-earned and nobly merited reward; and this even in spite of his nose. By the way, Cyrano's eyes must have been wonderful. They were grey, I think, and full of expression: melting in love, or kindling in war; expressing courage, purity, tenderness, or sacred rage. She must have rightly estimated Christian if Cyrano had not helped the Baron; and she could not understand De Bergerac mainly because she was so absorbed in fondness for his inferior rival. But if she had in time recognised the royal nature of Cyrano, and had rewarded him with the love for which he yearned so wildly, if she had done that, we should never have had the tragedy of the hidden passion which was detected so late-so sadly too late. Oh, the pity of it, Iago! One of the most subtle, touching, novel ideas in the play is that Roxane, who consciously loves Christian, is, in so doing, ignorantly loving her greater lover Cyrano. She really loved the fine qualities-the courage, wit, genius, magnanimity-of that most generous rival in all romance, Cyrano; but he, in devoted unselfishness, lent his high qualities to the man who was, in consequence, to succeed in winning that love of Roxane which Cyrano so desired and deserved. She really loved the beauty of Christian and the soul of De Bergerac. In loving Christian she was, in fact, though she knew it not, loving Cyrano-a rare and new imbroglio in a love romance.

Roxane loved an ideal of manhood, but, unfortunately, she attributed the possession of her ideal qualities to the wrong man; she rejected, in piteous error, the grotesque hero whom she really loved, and bestowed her affections on the ignobler competitor. It will, perforce, sometimes seem to us that, during Roxane's

widowhood, some occasion must have arisen on which the flood of genuine passion would have swept away the barriers of artificial restraint; and then there would have been declaration, explanation, and a victory for Cyrano; but M. Rostand has not willed it so. Our dramatist has a fine dramatic and poetical imagination; but he is brilliant and witty rather than humorous. His verse is wholly splendid, and his dialogue is mostly exquisite. You see the thoughts and feelings working in the minds of those who express them in such bright and subtle words. He has power, passion, and pathos, and a singular felicity of construction; and how he can indicate suppressed emotion! His letters to Roxane are beautiful and brilliant, and are full of tender romance. His instructions to the stage manager are as minute and pregnant as those of Sudermann himself. He has the instinct, craft, and cunning of the born dramatist of genius; and his comedy is always delicate and delightful.

Cyrano does not die in fight, or alone; but passes away, murdered, in the presence of his lady and his sword. They occupy fitly his last brave thoughts. To dying Bayard the hilt of his sword served as a crucifix; but the cup-hilted rapier of Cyrano had more ornament than a plain cross bar. The story of the play is admirable; and it is too great to need plot.

We have now followed very briefly the main threads of this noble and moving play. It were idle to spend time in searching for the Saxo Grammaticus, the Holinshed, the Giraldi Cinthio, the story, annal, poem, which may have afforded suggestion to our masterly dramatist. It is enough for us that the work is a creation, a charm, a masterpiece; that it is a splendid addition to dramatic literature, and that the stage is enriched by M. Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac."

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

CORN HARVEST.

A

AFTER CORN

STRONG wind from the south-east; long clouds, between

whose light fringes the sun peeps from a firmament of clear cobalt to blaze upon the southern horizon a bar of gold; a thick mist in the west, out of which the rooks come to their field labours as from behind a grey veil-these are the signs of the early morning, given in promise of a fine day. Towards noon the mist rolls away. The breeze follows the mist. A silence comes over the woodlands-that grief-stricken silence which broods upon the dying year, and which, from the sounds that at intervals break in upon the still hours, is rendered more profound. Russet and yellow leaves strew the fields and lie in heaps along the hedgerows. Still they fall, with a gentle but crisp touch, brushing the undergrowth in their spinning, downward flight.

Hushed are the thousand songs of summer. Hushed is the hum of insect life that filled the long days. Only the robin is now heard in the wood clearing, and what he trills is often interrupted, as if in the remembrance of his loneliness he suddenly forgot the music of his requiem. Only the last feeble bee drones aimlessly past. The grasshopper that unexpectedly chirrups in the sunlight is the ancient one of his family. The frail ephemeral fluttering up from the grass-top is a lonely loiterer loath to bid good-bye to the once radiant world.

There are wonderful tints in the woods-aureolin and crimson upon the bracken, golden and blood-red upon the brambles. The heart-shaped leaves of the withering bindweed-trails of orange and lemon yellow-hang over the hawthorns. Bare and white are the bines of the pink convolvulus.

But all the flowers have not yet faded. In the meadows the last blooms of the hawkbit, ragweed, yarrow, scabious, valerian and knapweed may still be seen among clusters of cup-shaped capsules and downy seed-heads. In the hedges the red berries still cling to the mountain ash and hawthorn and wild rose, to offer food for the silent birds when winter shall be clothed in white.

The salmon are now in the upper reaches of the river, for it is the spawning season, and every gravelly shallow is tenanted by a busy pair. The trout have left the rippling streams-where flies, hatched out in the whirlpools and drowned in the rapids, were formerly an abundant repast-and are now in the deep pools where the water is quiet and the temperature more equable. At this season birds forsake the hedgerows for the open stubbles and turnip fields, there to glean scattered grains or pick up pupæ hidden near the grass-roots. Family cares forgotten, the hare wanders further afield than when the corn was standing. But she returns to her "form" in the early morning, and lies on the top of the sunny bank throughout the day, her scut towards the wind and her ears turned back to catch the slightest alarm. The poacher soon grows acquainted with her regular habits, and learns her "run" from her footprints in the soft mud by the ditch or from a bit of fur in the gap. A day with the beagles, too, is a source of income for him. Then he carefully marks the hare's course, making a note of the gaps through which the hunted creature passes, and of the direction of the wind. If the hounds fail in their quest he secretly rejoices in her almost certain capture at his hands a few nights hence.

One of the best friends I ever possessed was well versed in the poacher's craft. In his early life he had subsisted on the spoils of the field; more recently, however, he had settled down into regular employment and chapel-going respectability. But a strange, uncontrollable longing would ever and anon come to him. Then, a prey to that indefinable feeling of vagabondage which clings to the particular side of nature which the poacher looks upon, but nevertheless anxious to avoid a breach of the law, he would come to my study, and over a jug of ale discuss plans for a lesson in the ways of night and night-prowlers. So the following afternoon saw us in the heart of the country, prepared to practise, up to a certain point, the poacher's wiles on those lands over which I myself, or a friend in the secret, held the sporting rights. Soon I became conversant with the paths usually trodden by unprincipled thieves, and from what I saw I gathered quite enough to convince me that the poacher has never yet revealed his ways to a book-reading public. Fortunate, indeed, for the average sportsman is his silence!

Old Evan's friendship for me dates back to such a day with the beagles as I have already mentioned. Immediately the fussy little hounds had "found" among the ferns at the top of Corrwg woods, and just as I was buttoning my coat for the long run I had promised myself as a welcome exercise, I felt a hand on my shoulders and,