soul of things.

Gilbert was determined to drown his sorrows this evening in the
divine harmonies of nature. To succeed the better, he called
poetry to his aid, for the great poets are the eternal mediators
between the soul of things and our feeble hearts of earth and clay.
He recited the distichs where Goethe has related in a tongue worthy
of Homer or Lucretius the metamorphosis of the plants. This was
placed like a preamble at the beginning of the volume which he
carried with him in his walks, and he had learned it by heart a few
days before. The better to penetrate the sense of these admirable
lines, he tried to translate them into French alexandrines, which
he sometimes composed. This effort at translation soon appeared to
him beyond his abilities; all the French words seemed too noisy,
too brilliant or too vulgar, or too solemn to render these mute
accents, these intonations veiled as if in religious mystery, by
which the author of Faust intended to express the subtle sounds and
even the silence of nature. We know that it is only in German
poetry that we can hear the grass growing from the bosom of the
earth, and the celestial spheres revolving in space.

Every language has its pedals and its peculiar registers; the
Teutonic muse alone can execute these solemn airs which must be
played with the soft pedal. For more than an hour Gilbert
exhausted himself in vain attempts, and at last, disheartened, he
contented himself with reciting aloud the poem which he despaired
of translating. He uttered the first part with the fire of
enthusiasm; but his voice fell as he pronounced the following
passage: