From ‘Monte Circello.’

     THE DEATH OF THE YEAR

     Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,
     In dying autumn, Erebus descends
     With the night’s thousand hours, along the verge
     Of the horizon, like a fugitive,
     Through the long days wanders the weary sun;
     And when at last under the wave is quenched
     The last gleam of its golden countenance,
     Interminable twilight land and sea
     Discolors, and the north wind covers deep
     All things in snow, as in their sepulchres
     The dead are buried.  In the distances
     The shock of warring Cyclades of ice
     Makes music as of wild and strange lament;
     And up in heaven now tardily are lit
     The solitary polar star and seven
     Lamps of the bear.  And now the warlike race
     Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast
     Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell
     To the white cliffs and slender junipers,
     And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song
     Of parting, and a sad metallic clang
     Send through the mists.  Upon their southward way
     They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet
     Flamy volcanoes and the seething founts
     Of geysers, and the melancholy yellow
     Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying
     Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,
     Journey away unto the joyous shores
     Of morning.

     From ‘An Hour of My Youth.’

JEAN LE ROND D’ALEMBERT

(1717-1783)

[Illustration:  D’ALEMBERT]

Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, one of the most noted of the “Encyclopedists,” a mathematician of the first order, and an eminent man of letters, was born at Paris in 1717.  The unacknowleged son of the Chevalier Destouches and of Mme. de Tencin, he had been exposed on the steps of the chapel St. Jean-le-Rond, near Notre-Dame.  He was named after the place where he was found; the surname of D’Alembert being added by himself in later years.  He was given into the care of the wife of a glazier, who brought him up tenderly and whom he never ceased to venerate as his true mother.  His anonymous father, however, partly supported him by an annual income of twelve hundred francs.  He was educated at the college Mazarin, and surprised his Jansenist teachers by his brilliance and precocity.  They believed him to be a second Pascal; and, doubtless to complete the analogy, drew his attention away from his theological studies to geometry.  But they calculated without their host; for the young student suddenly found out his genius, and mathematics and the exact sciences henceforth became his absorbing interests.  He studied successively law and medicine, but finding no satisfaction in either of these professions, with the true instincts of the scholar he chose poverty with liberty to pursue the studies he loved.  He astonished the scientific world by his first published works, ’Memoir on the Integral Calculus’ (1739) and ‘On the Refraction of Solid Bodies’ (1741); and while not yet twenty-four years old, the brilliant young mathematician was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences.  In 1754 he entered the Academie Francaise, and eighteen years later became its perpetual secretary.