In this book, morality, conduct, life are Surveyed from every point
of the compass, but from an eminence always. Austerity holds no
place in his philosophy; he finds room even "for the hours that
babble aloud in their wantonness." But all those who follow him are
led by smiling wisdom to the heights where happiness sits enthroned
between goodness and love, where virtue rewards itself in the
"silence that is the walled garden of its happiness."

It is strange to turn from this essay to Serres Chaudes and La
Princesse Maleine, M. Maeterlinck's earliest efforts--the one a
collection of vague images woven into poetical form, charming,
dreamy, and almost meaningless; the other a youthful and very
remarkable effort at imitation. In the plays that followed the
Princesse Maleine there was the same curious, wandering sense of,
and search for, a vague and mystic beauty: "That fair beauty which
no eye can see, Of that sweet music which no ear can measure." In a
little poem of his, Et s'il revenait, the last words of a dying
girl, forsaken by her lover, who is asked by her sister what shall
be told to the faithless one, should he ever seek to know of her
last hours:

"Et s'il m'interroge encore
Sur la derniere heure?--

Dites lui que j'ai souri
De peur qu'il ne pleure ..."

touch, perhaps, the very high-water mark of exquisite simplicity and
tenderness blent with matchless beauty of expression. Pelleas et
Melisande was the culminating point of this, his first, period--a