a family yoke, and put up with its little miseries?  That is a text I have meditated upon.  Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!  Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way; and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter.  I thought of all in my long, long meditations.  Do I not know that eminent men like you have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in their lives,—­you particularly, who send forth those airy visions of your soul that women rush to buy?  Yet still I cried to myself, “Onward!” because I have studied, more than you give me credit for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you tell me are so cold.  Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossi of egoism and poetry?  Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me.  Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for the development of personal character, but you must not.  Neither Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea.  And this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake.  The visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to his epoch, is an egoist?  Is a mother selfish when she immolates all things to her child?  Well, the detractors of genius do not perceive its fecund maternity, that is all.  The life of a poet is so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to bear even the ordinary pleasures of life.  Therefore, into what sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering his personal life, Moliere’s comedy is horrible.

The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you in this noble family of alleged egoists.  Ah! if I had found self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I should have had to bear.  I met with disappointment before I was sixteen.  What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in my heart was incapable of feeling them himself?  Oh! my friend, do you know what would have become of me?  Shall I take you into the recesses of my soul?  I should have gone to my father and said, “Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,—­marry me to whom you please.”  And the man might have been a notary, banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy