The Alps and Pyrenees

It is a fact not less singular than significant that this volume containing Victor Hugo's personal reminiscences of men and events should have had more than twice the sale of any other among his posthumous works. Full of interest, personal and historical, as is the many-colored record of "Choses Vues," its growing interest consists in the fact that the experiences recorded in the book are the experiences of the greatest writer of the nineteenth century: the value of his other posthumous works consists in the fact that, if no other legacy had been bequethed by him to time, they would have sufficed to prove him the greatest poet of an age which has been glorified by the advent of Tennyson, Browning, and Leconte de Lisle. The account of his excursions among the Alps, which occupies less than a quarter of the volume, might have been conjectured, by a careful and thoughtful student of man and his work, to belong to the same date as the series of letters from the Rhine.

The second and larger division of the book is yet more fascinating than the first part. The style is terser, keener, more trenchant and more vivid: the humor is riper and readier than before.

The preface was written by Algeron Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), who was an English lyrical poet during the Victorian period. He was born in London and educated in Oxford at Eton and Balliol College.