varied a fancy, so precocious a glory, such a sudden blossom of beauty and genius, and yet anguish, disgust, tears, and cries! What a mixture! With the same attitude he adores and curses. Eternal illusion, invincible experience, keep side by side in him to fight and tear him. He became old, and remained young; he is a poet, and he is a sceptic. The Muse and her peaceful beauty, Nature and her immortal freshness, Love and his happy smile, all the swarm of divine visions barely passed before his eyes, when we see approaching with curses, and sarcasms, all the spectres of debauchery and death. He is as a man in a festive scene, who drinks from a chased cup, standing up, in front, amidst applause and triumphal music, his eyes laughing, his heart full of joy, heated and excited by the generous wine he quaffed, whom suddenly we see growing pale; there was poison in the cup; he falls, and the death-rattle is in his throat; his convulsed feet beat upon the silken carpet, and all the terrified guests look on. This is what we felt on the day when the most beloved, the most brilliant amongst us, suddenly quivered from an unseen attack, and was struck down, being hardly able to breathe, amid the lying splendours and gaieties of our banquet. Well! such as he was, we love him for ever: we cannot listen to another; beside him, all seem cold or false. We leave at midnight the theatre in which he had heard Malibran, and we enter the gloomy rue des Moulins, where, on a hired bed, his Rolla1 came to sleep and die. The lamps cast flickering rays on the slippery pavement. Restless shadows march past the doors, and trail along their dress of draggled silk to 1 See vol. i. p. 237, n. 1. meet the passers-by. The windows are fastened; here and there a light pierces through a half closed shutter, and shows a dead dahlia on the edge of a window-sill. To-morrow an organ will grind before these panes, and the wan clouds will leave their droppings on these dirty walls. From this wretched place came the most impassioned of his poems! These vilenesses and vulgarities of the stews and the lodging-house caused this divine eloquence to flow! it was these which at such a moment gathered in this bruised heart all the splendours of nature and history, to make them spring up in sparkling jets, and shine under the most glowing poetic sun that ever rose ! We feel pity; we think of that other poet, away there in the Isle of Wight, who amuses himself by dressing up lost epics. How happy he is amongst his fine books, his friends, his honeysuckles and roses! No matter. De Musset, in this wretched abode of filth and misery, rose higher. From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite, as we see the sea from a storm-beaten promontory. Religions, their glory and their decay, the human race, its pangs and its destiny, all that is sublime in the world, appeared there to him in a flash of lightning. He felt, at least this once in his life, the inner tempest of deep sensations, giant-dreams, and intense voluptuousness, the desire of which enabled him to live, the lack of which forced him to die. He was no mere dilettante; he was not content to taste and enjoy; he left his mark on human thought; he told the world what was man, love, truth, happiness. He suffered, but he imagined; he fainted, but he created. He tore from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showed it to the eyes VOL. IV. 2 H of all, bloody but alive. That is harder and lovelier than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others. There is in the world but one work worthy of a man, the production of a truth, to which we devote ourselves, and in which we believe. The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of townsfolk and bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson. INDEX. ABELARD, i. 214, 217. Adhelm, i. 83, 90, 91, 250. Alexander VI., Pope, ii. 145. BACON, Francis, Lord, i. 338, 348 Bacon, Roger, i. 217. Balzac, Honoré de, i. 4; iv. 155, 209. Barclay, Robert, ii. 221. Barrow, Isaac, iii. 99, 104 seq. Baxter, Richard, i. 364; ii. 218; iil Bayly's (Lewis) Practice of Piety, ii. Angelo, Michael, i. 247; ii. 67; iii. Beattie, James, iii, 310, 377. 364. Anglo-Saxon poetry, i. 66 seq. Ann of Cleves, i. 251. Anselm, i. 99. Anthology, the, i. 282, 325. Arnold, Dr. Thomas, iii. 461; iv. 108. Beauclerk, Henry, i. 99. Beaumont, Francis, i. 397, 420-488; ii. 196, 203, 280. Becket, Thomas à, i 129. Beethoven, Lewis van, iii. 443. Ascham, Roger, i. 244, 334; ii. 143. Béranger, ii. 153; iv. 255. Athelstan, i. 45, 69. Augier, Emile, iv. 145. Austen, Jane, iii. 441. Bergmann's translations of Icelandio Berkeley, Bishop, iii. 115. Berkley, Sir Charles, ii. 333. Best, Paul, ii. 209. Bible, English. See Wiclif, Tyndale. Blackmore, Sir Richard, iii. 6. Boccaccio, i. 171, 178; iii. 62, 63. Boileau, ii. 338, 394; iii. 4, 59, 89, iii. 76, 80, 81, 115, 337; iv. 216. Browne, Sir Thomas, i. 333. 335, Burton, Robert, i. 235, 336-342; IL 187, 280. Busby, Dr. Richard, iii. 50. Butler, Samuel, ii. 328-332; iii. 116. CADMON, hymns of, i. 74, 79; his Calamy, Edinund, ii. 221. Campbell, Thomas, iii. 427; iv. 16. Carlyle, Thomas, i. 8; iii. 462; iv. Castlereagh, Lord, ii. 2. Chapman, George, ii. 4. Buckle, Henry Thomas, iv. 75 seq., Chateaubriand, i. 6; iii. 177. 105. Bulwer, iii. 441; iv. 113. Chatham. See Pitt. Chaucer, i. 141-143, 170, 212; iii Chesterfield, Lord, iii. 80 seq., 316, Chevy Chase, ballad of, i. 168. |