it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of the kind
you like. Let it be admitted that, when his characters make love, they
might do it "in a more human sort of way."

In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles Edgar
Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a _belle morte_ in some
distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the family sepulchre;
not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud--no, Aurelie and
Sylvie, in _Les Filles de Feu_, are nice and natural girls; but their
lover is not in love with them "in a human sort of way." He is in love
with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it
were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the
old _chateau_, or the farmer's cottage, or even the bright theatre, or
the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and
dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he
looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can
make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of
this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts
graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested
never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.

All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man and his
work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the personal
influence of one who is your friend, though other people cannot see what
you see in him.

Gerard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the
young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier. Their
gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be dwelt upon.
They were much of Scott's mind when he was young, and translated Burger,
and "wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-bones." Two or three of
them died early, two or three subsided into ordinary literary gentlemen
(like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets--Victor
Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval. It is not necessary to
have heard of Gerard; even that queer sham, the lady of culture, admits
without a blush that she knows not Gerard. Yet he is worth knowing.

What he will live by is his story of "Sylvie;" it is one of the little
masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One reads it, and
however old one is, youth comes back, and A