That is impregnated with the breath of a vernal night. The same poem (the "Nuit de Mai") contains the famous passage about the pelican--the passage beginning Les plus' desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux, Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots---- in which the legend of the pelican opening his breast to feed his starving young is made an image of what the poet does to entertain his readers: Poete, c'est ainsi que font les grands poetes. Ils laissent s'egayer ceux qui vivent un temps; Mais les festins humains qu'ils servent a leurs fetes Ressemblent la plupart a ceux des pelicans. This passage is perhaps--unless we except the opening verses of "Rolla"--Musset's noblest piece of poetic writing. We must place next to it--next to the three "Nuits"--the admirably passionate and genuine "Stanzas to Malibran"--a beautiful characterization of the artistic disinterestedness of the singer who suffered her genius to consume her--who sang herself to death. The closing verses of the poem have a wonderful purity; to rise so high, and yet in form, in accent, to remain so still and temperate, belongs only to great poetry; as it would be well to remind the critic who thinks the author of the "Stanzas to Malibran" dwarfish. There is another sort of verse in which violence of movement is more sensible than upwardness of direction. So far in relation to Musset's lyric genius--though we have given but a brief and inadequate account of it. He had besides a dramatic genius of the highest beauty, to which we have left ourself space to devote only a few words. It is true that the drama with Musset has a decidedly lyrical element, and that though his persons always talk prose, they are constantly saying things which would need very little help to fall into the mould of a stanza or a sonnet. In his dramas as in his verses, his weakness is that he is amateurish; they lack construction; their merit is not in their plots, but in what, for want of a better term, one may call their sentimental perfume. The earliest of them failed upon the stage, and for many years it was supposed they could not be played. Musset supposed so himself, and took no trouble to encourage the experiment. He made no concessions to contemporary "realism." But at last they were taken up--almost by accident--and it was found that, in the hands of actors whose education enabled them to appreciate their delicacy, this delicacy might become wonderfully effective. If feeling is the great quality in his verses, the case is the same in his strange, fantastic, exquisite little _comedies_; comedies in the literal English sense of the word we can hardly call them, for they have almost always a melancholy or a tragical termination. They are thoroughly sentimental; he puts before us people who convince us that they really _feel_; the drama is simply the history of their feeling. In the emotions of Valentin and Perdican, of Fantasio and Fortunio, of