The second of these Lettres d’un voyageur is entirely descriptive.  It is spring-time in Venice.  The old balconies are gay with flowers; the nightingales stop singing to listen to the serenades.  There are songs to be heard at every street corner, music in the wake of every gondola.  There are sweet perfumes and love-sighs in the air.  The delights of the Venetian nights had never been described like this.  The harmony of “the three elements, water, sky and marble,” had never been better expressed, and the charm of Venice had never been suggested in so subtle and, penetrating a manner.  The second letter treats too of the gondoliers, and of their habits and customs.

The third letter, telling us about the nobility and the women of Venice, completes the impression.  Just as the Pyrenees had moved George Sand, so Italy now moved her.  This was a fresh acquisition for her palette.  More than once from henceforth Venice was to serve her for the wonderful scenery of her stories.  This is by no means a fresh note, though, in George Sand’s work.  There is no essential difference, then, in her inspiration.  She had always been impressionable, but her taste was now getting purer.  Musset, the most romantic of French poets, had an eminently classical taste.  In the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, he defined romanticism as an abuse of adjectives.  He was of Madame de Lafayette’s opinion, that a word taken out was worth twenty pennies, and a phrase taken out twenty shillings.  In a copy of Indiana he crossed out all the useless epithets.  This must have made a considerable difference to the length of the book.  George Sand was too broad-minded to be hurt by such criticism, and she was intelligent enough to learn a lesson from it.

Musset’s transformation was singularly deeper.  When he started for Venice, he was the youngest and most charming of poets, fanciful and full of fun.  “Monsieur mon gamin d’Alfred,” George Sand called him at that time.  When he returned from there, he was the saddest of poets.  For some time he was, as it were, stunned.  His very soul seemed to be bowed down with his grief.  He was astonished at the change he felt in himself, and he did not by any means court any fresh inspiration.

J’ai vu, le temps ou ma jeunesse Sur mes levres etait sans cesse Prete a chanter comme un oiseau; Mais j’ai souffert un dur martyre Et le moins que j’en pourrais dire, Si je lessayais sur a lyre, La briserait comme un roseau,

he writes.

In the Nuit de Mai, the earliest of these songs of despair, we have the poet’s symbol of the pelican giving its entrails as food to its starving young.  The only symbols that we get in this poetry are symbols of sadness, and these are at times given in magnificent fulness of detail.  We have solitude in the Nuit de decembre, and the labourer whose house has been burnt in the Lettre a Lamartine.  The Nuit d’aout gives proof of a wild effort to give life another trial, but in the Auit d’octobre anger gets the better of him once more.