Leopardi, who was a distinguished philologist, an excellent Hellenist, a great poet and an ingenious philosopher, endowed with eloquence, was unable to discover happiness or even peace in the exercise of these multiple gifts. His health was of the most wretched; his heart, left empty, sounded in his bosom at the slightest shock; he was timid and his nerves quivered at every jar, like those harps which were in fashion during his youth. He was born four years before Victor Hugo and died young, without having tasted fame, while Manzoni, who was destined to fill an entire century, had been for a long time known throughout Europe. Is the source of Leopardi's pessimism to be sought among these divers causes? That is hard to believe. The invalid, far from cursing life, is filled with hope; he is an optimist, and wishes to get well; he knows that he will recover. He is not the person with whom to speak of the infinite vanity of all things. It would rouse his fury to listen to the condemnation of those boons that are momentarily out of his reach but which he is preparing to seize and reconquer. Scarron was more sickly and more deformed than Leopardi, yet he was none the less a gay, all too gay, fellow. As for not being understood, or at least, not being received at one's proper value,--there is nothing in that to make a healthy mind pessimistic. The superior man, after all, scorns the opinion of men so long as it remains only an opinion,--that is to say, a matter without practical consequences. And this was Leopardi's situation, for he could have lived in independence upon his scant, but honorable patrimony. Pessimism is related to character, and character is an expression of physiology. The case with writers, philosophers and poets is exactly the same as with men of other professions. They are gay, sad, witty, morose, avaricious, liberal, ardent, lazy, and their talent assumes the color of their character. If one were to make a study of literature from this point of view,--a procedure which would not lack interest,--one would very probably discover a great number of pessimists, or, as they were called formerly, sad spirits. There are few men of worth who have not at times found a bitter taste to life, even among those who, like M. Renan, professed eternal joviality. There is no great writer without great sensibility; he is capable of keen joys, and of excessive pain as well. Now pain, which is depressive, leaves deeper traces in life than joy. If intelligence does not rule, if it does not intervene to establish a hierarchy, or an equilibrium of sensations, then the sad ideas triumph because of their superior numbers and power. Renan's serenity is perhaps only the apathy of indifference; Goethe's serenity represents the victory of intellect over sensibility.