The Galaxy, June 1877.-June, 1877.-No. 6. (XXIII) baixar o livro de graça

Excerpt: ...last of his dramatic proverbs, is very charming, very perfect in its way; but compared with the tones of the "Caprices de Marianne," the "Chandelier," "Fantasio," the sentiment is thin and the style has rather a simper. It is what the French call marivaudage. There can, however, be no better example of the absoluteness of the poetic sentiment, of its justifying itself as it goes, of lyrical expression being as it were not only a means, but an end, than the irresistible beauty of such effusions as the "Lettre a Lamartine" and the "Nuit d'Aout." Poete, je t'ecris pour te dire que j'aime! --that is all, literally, that Musset has to say to the "amant d'Elvire"; and it would be easy to make merry at the expense of so simply candid a piece of "gush." But the confidence is made with a transparent ardor, a sublime good faith, an audible, touching tremor of voice, which, added to the enchanting harmony of the verse, make the thing one of the most splendid poems of our day. Ce ne sont pas des chants, ce ne sont que des larmes, Et je ne te dirai que ce que Dieu m'a dit! Musset has never risen higher. He has, in strictness, only one idea--the idea that the passion of love and the act of loving are the divinest things in a miserable world; that love has a thousand disappointments, deceptions, and pangs, but that for its sake they are all worth enduring, and that, as Tennyson has said, more curtly and reservedly, 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. Sometimes he expresses this idea in the simple epicurean fashion, with gayety and with a more or less cynical indifference to the moral side of the divine passion. Then he is often pretty, picturesque, fanciful, but he remains essentially light. At other times he feels its relation to the other things that make up man's destiny, and the sense of aspiration meets with the sense of enjoyment or of regret. Then he is at his best; then he seems an image of universally...