[1] "L'Abbaye de Fontenelle ou de Saint-Wandrille." Paris. 1827.
[2] From "The Past", by Maurice Maeterlinck. _The Independent,_ March 6, 1902.
[3] "The Portrait of a Lady", in "The Double Garden."
[4] See her account of the performance in _Century Magazine_, January, 1911.
[5] For Maeterlinck on Emerson, see _Poet Lore_, Vol. 10, p. 76, January, 1898, and _Arena_, Vol. 16, p. 563, March, 1896.
[7] "The Mystery of Justice", in "The Double Garden."
[11] For a description of the performance see "A Realization of Macbeth" by Alvan G. Sanborn in _The Independent_, September 15, 1909.
[13] His admiration for Browning appears in his reply to Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, who had called attention to the close similarity between an incident in Browning's "Luria" and Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna." Maeterlinck very frankly and courteously acknowledged his indebtedness to Browning, whom, he said, he regarded, like Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, as common sources of literary inspiration. _The Independent_, March 5 and June 11, 1903.
[14] This is signed by his name in its original form, Mooris Mäterlinck. A translation of this and other tales by Belgian writers by Edith Wingate Rinder was published in 1897 in the "Green Tree Library" of Stone & Kimball (now Duffield & Co.).
[15] _Figaro_, August 24, 1890. Octave Mirbeau later busied himself in booming Marguerite Audoux, the Paris sempstress, who wrote "Marie-Claire."
The history of philosophy shows us chiefly the ceaselessly renewed efforts of reflection laboring to attenuate difficulties, to resolve contradictions, to measure with an increasing approximation a reality incommensurable with our thought. But from time to time bursts forth a soul which seems to triumph over these complications by force of simplicity, the soul of artist or of poet, keeping close to its origin, reconciling with a harmony felt by the heart terms perhaps irreconcilable by the intelligence. The language which it speaks, when it borrows the voice of philosophy, is not similarly understood by everybody. Some think it vague, and so it is in what it expresses. Others feel it precise, because they experience all it suggests. To many ears it brings only the echo of a vanished past, but others hear in it as in a prophetic dream the joyous song of the future.