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Le Temple Enseveli is by no means equal, as literature or as philosophy, to Le Trésor des Humbles, or even to La Sagesse et la Destinée, but it is, like everything which Maeterlinck writes, full of brooding honesty of thought and of a grave moral beauty of feeling. It is the work of a thinker who "waits patiently," like a Christian upon divine grace, upon the secret voices which come to us out of the deepest places in our nature. He is absolutely open-minded, his trust and his skepticism are alike an homage to truth. If what he has to say to us is not always "la sagesse même," it is at least the speech of one who has sought after wisdom more heedfully than any other writer of our time.

Le Double Jardin is a collection of essays which form a kind of postscript to Le Temple Enseveli. They are somewhat less abstract, perhaps a little more casual, than the essays in that book, and are concerned with subjects as varied as The Wrath of the Bee, The Motor-Car, and Old-fashioned Flowers. Maeterlinck has never written anything in prose more graceful, more homely, and more human than some of these pages, particularly those on flowers. In The Leaf of Olive and in Death and the Crown he carries speculation beyond the limits of our knowledge, and "thinks nobly," not of the soul alone, but also of the intelligence of man in its conflict with the deadly, unintelligent oppositions of the natural forces of the world. Such pages are fortifying, and we can not but be grateful for what is plausible in their encouragement. But the larger part of the book is made up of notes by the way, which have all the more charm because they are not too systematically arranged.