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Roland. There are some poets whose fame rests on a single, and not unfrequently a very small poem,—a sonnet or a few couplets. In France, the fame of Félix Arvers rests on the well-known sonnet,
'Mon âme a son secret, ma vie a son mystère,'
which is given above. In England, the fame of Sir Egerton Brydges, who has written volumes on volumes of both prose and verse, rests on a single beautiful sonnet, 'Echo and Silence,' commencing with the line,
'In eddying course when leaves began to fly,'—
Blancho White's fame rests on a single sonnet, 'Night and Death,' considered by Coleridge the best in the language:
'Mysterious night! when our first parent knew.'
The Rev. C. Wolfe's fame rests on the lines called the 'Burial of Sir John Moore'—magnificent lines which every schoolboy knows by heart, though they embody only the simple details given in Colonel Napier's history,
'Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note.
Similarly the fame of M. Napoléon Peyrat rests on this one poem of one hundred and twenty lines. It is difficult to convey in a translation an idea of the rapid movement, 'rapid as the course of the traveller addressed, or the gallop of the horses of Musa el Kevir,' and the vivid colouring of the original piece. We have done our best, but our best is bad Any traveller who has followed the same itinerary as the poet will at once recognise that the country described has not been dreamed of and created out of the depths of his own powerful imagination by some grand magician of a poet, but is a country seen, taken in, and admirably rendered by a few strokes of the brush of a master painter. 'La vermeille Orlèans, Limoges aux trois sveltes clochers, l'Aveyron murmurant entre des pelouses pleines de parfums, les grèves pensives du Tescoud, le Tarn fauve, la Garonne aux longs flots, aux eaux convulsives où nagent des navires bruns et des îlots verdoyants, Toulouse, jetée comme une perle au milieu des fleurs, les blancs chevaux à la crinière argentée, dont le pied grêle a des poils noirs comme des plumes d'aigle, Fénelon le cygne aux chants divins,
"Qui nageait aux sources d'Homère!"
et à la dernière strophe, les armées passant par Roncevaux—soldats, canons, tambours, chevaux, chants tonnant dans l'espace, &c.' 'Voilá bien,' says a French critic, M. Charles Asselineau, 'l'art de I833; l'art d'enchâsser savamment l'image dans le vers et de tout combiner pour l'effet, et le son, et la figure, et le rhythme, et la coupe, et la place et l'enjambement.'
The author wrote under the nom de plume of Napol le Pyrénéen, and his real name was long unknown. At last M. Paul Boiteau published it with some details of the life of the poet. He is a Protestant pastor and was the friend of Béranger and Lamennais. He lives still, and has a charge in a village 'avoisinant Saint-Germain.' He wrote other poems in his youth, when
