And certainly this admirable, and supremely dangerous, quality was at the root of Verlaine's nature. Instinctive, unreasoning as he was, entirely at the mercy of the emotion or impression which, for the moment, had seized upon him, it was inevitable that he should be completely at the mercy of the most imperious of instincts, of passions, and of intoxications. And he had the simple and ardent nature, in this again consistently childlike, to which love, some kind of affection, given or returned, is not the luxury, the exception, which it is to many natures, but a daily necessity. To such a temperament there may or may not be the one great passion; there will certainly be many passions. And in Verlaine I find that single, childlike necessity of loving and being loved, all through his life and on every page of his works; I find it, unchanged in essence, but constantly changing form, in his chaste and unchaste devotions to women, in his passionate friendships with men, in his supreme mystical adoration of God. To turn from _La Bonne Chanson,_ written for a wedding present to a young wife, to _Chansons pour Elle,_ written more than twenty years later, in dubious honour of a middle-aged mistress, is to travel a long road, the hard, long road which Verlaine had travelled during those years. His life was ruinous, a disaster, more sordid perhaps than the life of any other poet; and he could write of it, from a hospital-bed, with this quite sufficient sense of its deprivations. "But all the same, it is hard," he laments, in _Mes Hôpitaux,_ "after a life of work, set off, I admit, with accidents in which I have had a large share, catastrophes perhaps vaguely premeditated--it is hard, I say, at forty-seven years of age, in full possession of all the reputation (of the _success,_ to use the frightful current phrase) to which my highest ambitions could aspire--hard, hard, hard indeed, worse than hard, to find myself--good God!--to find myself _on the streets,_ and to have nowhere to lay my head and support an ageing body save the pillows and the _menus_ of a public charity, even now uncertain, and which might at any moment be withdrawn--God forbid!--without, apparently, the fault of any one, oh! not even, and above all, not mine." Yet, after all, these sordid miseries, this poor man's vagabondage, all the misfortunes of one certainly "irreclaimable," on which so much stress has been laid, alike by friends and by foes, are externalities; they are not the man; the man, the eternal lover, passionate and humble, remains unchanged, while only his shadow wanders, from morning to night of the long day.