Note 1 — ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

In the winter of the year which in spring had seen Les Rayons et les Ombres come forth to kindle and refresh the hearts of readers, Victor Hugo published au ode in the same key as those To the Column and To the Arch of Triumph, on the return and reinterment of the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous eloquence, the place of this poem in any collection of its author's works is distinctly and unmistakably marked out by every quality it has and by every quality it wants. In style and in sentiment, in opinion and in rhythm, it is one with the national and political poems which had already been published by the author since the date of his Orientales: in other words, it is in every possible point utterly and absolutely unlike the poems long afterwards to be written by the author in exile. Its old place, therefore, in all former editions, at the end of the volume containing the poems previously published in the same year, is obviously the only right one, and rationally the only one possible. By what inexplicable and inconceivable caprice it has been promoted to a place in the so-called édition définitive, on the mighty roll of the Légende des Siècles, at the head of the fourth volume of that crowning work of modern times, I am hopelessly and helplessly at a loss to conjecture. But, at all risk of impeachment on a charge of unbecoming presumption, I must and do here enter my most earnest and strenuous protest against the claim of an edition to be in any sense final and unalterable, which rejects from among the Châtiments the poem on the death of Saint-Arnaud and admits into the Légende des Siècles the poem on the reinterment of Napoleon.