He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all. WALTER PATER. GÉRARD DE NERVAL. I. Of Gérard de Nerval, whose true name was Gérard Labrunie, it has been finely said: "His was the most beautiful of all the lost souls of the French Romance."(*) Born in 1808, he came to his death by suicide one dark winter night towards the end of January. The story of this life and its tragic finale was well known at the time to all men of letters,--Théophile Gautier, Paul de Saint-Victor, Arsène Houssaye,--friends who never forgot the young poet even after he went the way that madness lies. For it was insanity,--a nostalgia of the soul always imminent--that led him into the squalid _Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne_, in which long forgotten corner of old Paris his dead body was found one bleak belated dawn. And this was forty years ago. In later days Maxime du Camp and Ludovic Halévy have retold with great feeling the history of Gérard, his early triumphs, his love for Jenny Colon,--the Aurélie of these _Souvenirs du Valois_,--and how at last life's scurrile play was ended. (*) See _A Century of French Verse_, translated and edited by William John Robertson (4to, London, 1895). II. One of Mr. Andrew Lang's most genuine appreciations occurs in an epistle addressed to Miss Girton, Cambridge; where, for the benefit of that mythical young person, he translates a few passages out of _Sylvie_, and favours us with a specimen of Gérard's verse. "I translated these fragments," he tells her, "long ago in one of the first things I ever tried to write. The passages are as touching and fresh, the originals, I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice of Sylvie singing: _'A Dammartin, l'y a trois belles filles,_ _L'y en a z'une plus belle que le jour.'_ So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the 'Ballad of Forty Years,' 'Adrienne's dead' in a convent. That is all the story, all the idyl." And just before this he has said of Gérard: "What he will live by, is his story of Sylvie; it is one of the little masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One reads it, and however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and a thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs, of brooks trotting merrily under the rustic bridges. And this fresh nature is peopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, or pensive, standing with eager feet on the threshold of their life, innocent, expectant, with the old ballads of old France upon their lips. For the story is full of these artless, lisping numbers of the popular French muse, the ancient ballads that Gérard collected and put into the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant-girl."