ery one in the way of trial and sorrow, it
is not worth while to go in search of emotions and experience which are
certain to find us out; nor is it in the slums of life that its meaning is
to be sought. He had foretold his own end in the prophetic warning of his
Muse:

Quand les dieux irrites m'oteront ton genie,
Si je tombe des cieux que me repondras-tu?

His light was not lost in a storm-cloud nor eclipse, but in the awful
Radnorok, the Goetterdaemmerung, when sun and stars fall from a blank heaven.
His health and habits constantly grew worse--he had organic disease of the
heart--but his existence dragged on until May 1st, 1857, when an acute
attack carried him off after a few days' illness. He died in his brother's
arms, and his last words were, "Sleep! at last I shall sleep." He had
killed himself physically and intellectually as surely as the wages of sin
are death.

But let not this be the last word on one so beloved as a poet and a man.
Mental qualities alone never endear their possessor to every being that
comes into contact with him, and Alfred de Musset was idolized by people
who could not even read. There was not a generous or amiable quality in
which he was wanting: he had an inextinguishable ardor for genius and
greatness in every form; he was tender-hearted to excess, could not endure
the sight of suffering, and delighted in giving pleasure; his sympathy was
ready and entire, his loyalty of the truest metal. "He never abused
anybody," says his brother, "nor sacrificed an absent person for the sake
of a good story." He loved animals and children, and they loved him in
return.

He can never cease to be the poet of the many, for he has melody,
sentiment, passion, all that charms the popular ear and heart--a
personality which is the expression of human nature in a language which, as
he himself says, few speak, but all understand. He can never cease to be
the poet of the few, because, while his poems are a very concentration and
elixir of the most intense and profound feelings of which we are all
capable, they give words to the more exquisite and intimate emotions
peculiar to those of a keener and more refined susceptibility, of a more
exalted and aerial range. Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, though not in his
final verdict on De Musset, that his chief merit is having restored to
French literature the wit which had been driven out of it by the
sentimentalists. His wit is indeed delightful and irresist