TAKE heed of this small child of earth;
He is great: he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.
In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.
Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry, Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.
The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,
When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that weep!
The greatest thing that Victor Hugo ever did, according to Francis Gribble, an English commentator, was not to write "Les Miserables," nor to overwhelm the world with his Olympian fecundity of poetry and rhetoric. It was to fasten upon humanity "the Hugo legend."
...
For many years the question has been debated whether Victor Hugo was a great man or a great windbag. "Perhaps," Mr. Gribble suggests,
"he was both; ...
