words ; how now and then a fabulous animal, perhaps a stag with silver horns, comes by, or else a chaste unicorn, leaping from the thicket, lays his head in the lovely lady's lap. And they see how the water-ladies rise with green hair and glittering veils, and how all at once the moon rises, and they hear how the nightingale trills — and they shake their wise heads at all the incomprehensibly nonsensical stuff! Yes, the French can comprehend the sun but not the moon, and least of all the rapturous sobbing and melancholy ecstasy of the nightingales.
Yes, neither their empirical familiarity with human passions, nor their positive knowledge of the world, is of any avail to the French, when they would unriddle the visions and sounds which gleam and ring forth from the magic gardens of Shakespearean comedy ; they often think they see a human face, yet when near by it is a landscape fair—what they believed were eyebrows was a hazel-bush, and the nose was a rock, and the mouth a little fountain, as we see them in changing puzzle-pictures. And, on the other hand, what the poor Frenchmen mistake for a strangely gnarled old tree, or marvellous stone, appears on closer view to be a real human face of tremendous expression. And if they succeed in overhearing with strained ears some dialogue which two lovers are holding in the
