sm, his Horoscope cast by a
Gypsy, and others,--have neither sparkle nor splendor. The prophet is
not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm. On the theme of Napoleon, Victor
Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so
called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France
numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have
the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be
able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the
Remains of Beranger, if one chose to institute a comparison. We may well
say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one
is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse;
one gains no honor by the experiment. Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but
in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it
seems to be more difficult.

But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Beranger, the Beranger of
the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again;
and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now
imperfectly known. He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780;
and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that "Paris had not
to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty
and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most
sympathy." He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good
old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,--one of the noisiest of the
Parisian streets, famous for its _restaurants_ and the number of oysters
consumed in them. "Seeing me born," he says, "in one of the dirtiest and
noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods,
fields, flowers, and birds so much?" It is true that Beranger loved
them,--but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and
child of the Rue Montorgueil. A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and
hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden,
a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside
wheat-fields,--these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never
journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the
ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid
all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to
oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his,
and to say to him, "I