than a receptacle, to put it more exactly.

And he asks at last, demonstrat-ing that Minou is a child poetess — a great one:

Why should a child poetess not be able, in the first years of her life, to give expression to the wondrous gift deposited within her? Have we not known child prodigies in arithmetic — Pascal; and in music — Mozart?

As for the 'Figaro littéraire,' it championed the poetess with a warm defense by 'André Rousseaux,' in which he said:

I am anxious that Minou may perhaps write in the future — or may never write again! It is possible that no production at all will follow these fifty pages of the adopted child! But the little star that has appeared in our sad world will shed a light no less pure than that of the great stars. And we shall always remember her appearance — together with the swiftness of her extinction — in every commonplace liter-ary season.

As for 'Minou's' own defense, it was her quiet cry, brimming with childhood. Heavy-laden with giving. Colored with imagination. Singing with music...

'Is it a crime, if we sing what stirs in our hearts?'

Is it a crime, if we sing what stirs in our hearts?

An answer I whisper in the ear of every great poet who is no longer a child. I whisper it in the ear of every man. In the ear of every woman. In the ear of everyone who tries to silence the heart's speech and strike it dumb forever, so as to carve the heart into a trumpet into

which he empties the rattle of a head weighed down by the din of materialism. And partisan passions. And racial prejudices.

'Minou' was once asked: Do you compose verse in the 'alexandrine' manner — that is, with the line of the poem resting on twelve feet?... She thought sadly, and answered:

We do not make poetry. A cloud passes... something flows out... We have no part in it: it is the cloud that is responsible.

No, my verses have no feet, and my verses have no wings!

The poetess answered well. No — in her poems there is not so much as a period, or a comma, or a vowel mark... They are all one pic-ture, smoothly unrolling, bedewed with the mysterious, soaring spirit of childhood. In the poem of the clouds, for instance, she says:

'O clouds you are a hedge of feathers'

Then she says:

'you are mountains crawling toward me that can break noth-ing of me'

And then this calling out! The apostrophe at the opening of every poem embodies for us the child's attempt to seize the thing and feel it, so as to soar with it, and from it, into the far... the far distance:

'O eyes streaming with the anxiety of night kindle in the four corners of the world the fires of the beacons made of your recovered flame.'

And the poetess never strays far from the world of childhood — and this is the most eloquent proof with which to convince the disbelievers in her gift:

'O blue road where are you going? The moon has colored your skirt blue to weave upon it a long

ribbon of paper on which the willow's trunk has drawn two boughs of itself and wide-open hands of plane-tree leaves.'

the extent of this influence and its relation to the role that the small states can play. The field in which the great powers exert their strongest influence is the political field, because the question of peace and war is bound up with the responsibility

of these great powers — a respon-sibility which the Charter of the United Nations itself has acknowl-edged as theirs. In such a case it is difficult for a small state, acting alone, to play an important part in this field. Yet the small states, if they agree among themselves, can influence the positions of the great powers and bring about an important change in them, as has sometimes happened with the Asian-African bloc, or the bloc of the Latin American states, or the two blocs together.

As for the other fields, and especially the social, cultural, economic, and legal fields, the role of the great powers, contrary to what is commonly believed, is very small. Here, in these fields, the small states occupy a distin-guished place. What qualifies a particular small state to play an important part in these fields is the fulfillment of two conditions. The first: that it stand at a high level of progress and advancement in its intellectual, cultural, and civil conditions. The second: that its delegates be men of intel-lectual and moral superiority, in addition to wisdom, shrewdness, and experience.

If these two conditions are fulfilled, those states will play a distinguished part in these fields.