Ah keep them long!  The heart which breathes the prayer
When genius calls has ever made reply,
Bear smiling home to Italy the fair,
A flower from our sky.

* * * * *

They tell me that in spite of grief and wrong,
And pride bent earthward by a tyrant’s heel,
A noble race, though crushed and conquered long,
Has not yet learned to kneel.

Rome’s godlike dwellers of a bygone age,
The marble, porphyry, alabaster forms,
Still live:  at night, to speech upon the stage,
An ancient statue warms.

* * * * *

What was the cause of De Musset’s unhappiness and impotence?  His brother tries to account for them by an enumeration of the distresses and annoyances mentioned above, and others of the same order; but when one remembers how the poet’s great sorrows, his father’s death and the betrayal of his affection by the first woman he really loved, had given him his finest conceptions in verse and prose, it is impossible to accept so insufficient an explanation.  Nor can we allow that De Musset sank into a condition of puerile impatience and senile querulousness.  Judged by our standard, all the Latin races lack manhood, as we may possibly do by theirs:  De Musset was only as much more sensitive than the rest of his countrymen as those of the poetic temperament are usually found to be in all countries.  Nor had he seen his talent slowly expire:  the spring did not run dry by degrees:  it suddenly sank into the ground.  He had made a fearful mistake at the outset, which he discovered too late if at all.  Considering what life is sure to bring to every 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.