n. He died in the arms of his
brother in the spring of 1857.

He was beyond question one of the first poets of our day. If the poetic
force is measured by the _quality_ of the inspiration--by its purity,
intensity, and closely personal savor--Alfred de Musset's place is
surely very high. He was, so to speak, a thoroughly _personal_ poet.
He was not the poet of nature, of the universe, of reflection, of
morality, of history; he was the poet simply of a certain order of
personal emotions, and his charm is in the frankness and freedom, the
grace and harmony, with which he expressed these emotions. The affairs
of the heart--these were his province; in no other verses has the heart
spoken more characteristically. Herr Lindau says very justly that if he
was not the greatest poet among his contemporaries, he was at any rate
the most poetically constituted nature. A part of the rest of Herr
Lindau's judgment is worth quoting:

He has remained the poet of youth. No one has sung so truthfully
and touchingly its aspirations and its sensibilities, its doubts
and its hopes. No one has comprehended and justified its follies
and its amiable idiosyncrasies with a more poetic irony, with a
deeper conviction. His joy was young, his sorrow was young, and
young was his song. To youth he owes all happiness, and in youth he
sang his brightest chants. But the weakness of youth was his fatal
enemy, and with youth faded away his joy in existence and in
creation.

This is exactly true. Half the beauty of Musset's writing is its simple
suggestion of youthfulness--of something fresh and fair, slim and
tremulous, with a tender epidermis. This quality, with some readers,
may seem to deprive him of a certain proper dignity; and it is very
true that he was not a Stoic. You may even call him unmanly. He cries
out when he is hurt; he resorts frequently to tears, and he talks much
about his tears. (We have seen that after his return from Venice they
formed, for four months, his principal occupation.) But his defence is
that if he does not bear things like a man, he at least, according to
Shakespeare's distinction, feels them like a man. What makes him
valuable is just this gift for the expression of that sort of emotion
which the conventions and proprieties of life, the dryness of ordinary
utterance, the stiffness of most imaginations, leave quite in the
vague, and yet which forms a part of human nature important en