The question comes here: How much does Baudelaire give of himself in his letters? Some of his inner, some of his outer life; but, for the most part, "in tragic hints." Yet in the whole of his letters he never gives one what Meredith does in _Modern Love,_ which, published in 1862, remains his masterpiece, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse. It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse: it is like scraps of broken--of heart-broken--talk, overheard and jotted down at random. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no illusions, and their tragic hints "are like a fine, pained mockery of love itself as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these: "O thou Weed Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou had'st ne'er been born." Another question arises: How can a man who wrote his letters in a _café,_ anywhere, do more than jot down whatever came into his head? Has he ever given an account of one day in his life--eventful or uneventful? You might as well try to count the seconds of your watch as try to write for yourself your sensations during one day. What seems terrible is the rapidity of our thoughts: yet, fortunately, one is not always thinking. "Books think for me; I don't think," says Lamb in one of his paradoxes. There is not much thought in his prose: imagination, humour, salt and sting, tragical emotions, and, on the whole, not quite normal. How can any man of genius be entirely normal? The most wonderful letters ever written are Lamb's. Yet, as in Balzac's, in Baudelaire's, in Browning's, so few of Lamb's letters, those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends in art.