Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed, nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress.  Victor Hugo’s PLEIN ceil, in his epic la LEGENDE des siecles,[Footnote:  A.D. 1859.] announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way.  The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off.  The horrible past has gone, not to return:  “ce monde est mort”; and the poem is at once a paean on man’s victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of his future.

Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening to traverse the ether.

Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres;
 Et l’on voit voir passer la strophe du progres. 
 Il est la nef, il est le phare! 
 L’homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton. 
 Et l’on voit s’envoler le calcul de Newton
 Monte sur l’ode de Pindare.

But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo returns to earth: 

Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons.  Restons
 L’homme, restons Adam; mais non l’homme a tatons,
 Mais non l’Adam tombe!  Tout autre reve altere
 L’espece d’ideal qui convient a la terre. 
 Contentons-nous du mot:  meilleur! ecrit partout.

Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and man, freed by “the invisible hand” from the weight of his chains, has embarked for new shores: 

Ou va-t-il ce navire?  II va, de jour vetu,
 A l’avenir divin et pur, a la vertu,
 A la science qu’on voit luire,
 A la mort des fleaux, a l’oubli genereux,
 A l’abondance, au caime, au rire, a l’homme heureux,
 Il va, ce glorieux navire.

Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre! 
 C’est l’ascension bleue a son premier degre;
 Hors de l’antique et vil decombre,
 Hors de la pesanteur, c’est l’avenir fonde;
 C’est le destin de l’homme a la fin evade,
 Qui leve l’ancre et sort de l’ombre!

The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had expressed as “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,” the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo’s imagination something more sublime.  The magic ship of man’s destiny is to compass the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the whole universe.

Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu’eri marchant,
 Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant,
 Rajeuni les races fletries,
 Etabli l’ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur,
 Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l’homme tant d’azur
 Qu’elle a supprime les patries!