you read, you have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you

know that the hero cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves,
the cottage and its shelter, are not for him. He is only passing

by, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons are alluring him,
the great city is drawing him to herself and will slay him one day

in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.
Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder young men and women

in a great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused
themselves by decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play,

or rather from watching the particular actress for whom he had a
distant, fantasticpassion. He leaves the theatre and takes up a

newspaper, where he reads that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to
meet the Archers of Loisy. These were places in his native

district, where he had been a boy. They recalled many memories; he
could not sleep that night; the old scenes flashed before his half-

dreaming eyes. This was one of the visions.
"In front of a chateau of the time of Henri IV., a chateau with

peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing of red brick varied by
stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round with

limes and elms, and through the leaves fell the golden rays of the
setting sun. Young girls were dancing in a circle on the mossy

grass, to the sound of airs that their mothers had sung, airs with
words so pure and natural that one felt one's self indeed in that

old Valois land, where for a thousand years has beat the heart of
France.

"I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little
friend, Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylvie, so full of

life, so fresh, with her dark eyes, her regular profile, her
sunburnt face. I had loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, till

the daughter of the chateau, fair and tall, entered the circle of
peasant girls. To obtain the right to join the ring she had to

chant a scrap of a ballad. We sat round her, and in a fresh, clear
voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance, full of love and

sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the great trees grew
deeper, and the broad light of the risen moon fell on her alone, she

standing without the listening circle. Her song was over, and no
one dared to break the silence. A light mist arose from the mossy

ground, trailing over the grass. We seemed to be in Paradise."
So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress, the daughter

of a line of nobles with king's blood in her veins. And little
brown, deserted Sylvie cried.

All this Gerard remembered, and remembering, hurried down to the old
country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful,

unspoiled, still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales.
They walked together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of

Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared
dinner for them, and sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to

ransack the peasant treasures in the garret.
Two portraits were hanging there--one that of a young man of the

good old times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an
oval frame. Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay,

piquante, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with a bird
perched on her finger. It was the old aunt in her youth, and

further search discovered her ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade.
Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour; patches were found in a

box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber.
The holidayattire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the

royal woods, was not far to seek, and Gerard and Sylvie appeared
before the aunt, as her old self, and her old lover. "My children!"

she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears at the cruel and
charming apparition of youth. Presently she dried her tears, and

only remembered the pomp and pride of her wedding. "We joined
hands, and sang the naive epithalamium of old France, amorous, and

full of flowery turns, as the Song of Songs; we were the bride and
the bridegroom all one sweet morning of summer."

I translated these fragments 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 idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own
delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reve et la Vie) were in his

pocket when they found him dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.
Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the

grace of his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things
like this:

"Ou sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau!

Elles sont plus heureuses
Dans un sejour plus beau."

But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:
"Neither good morn nor good night."

The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;
Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;

But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,
And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!

Gerard's poems are few; the best are his vision of a lady with gold
hair and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier existence, and

his humorous little piece on a boy's love for a fair cousin, and on
their winter walk together, and the welcome smell of roast turkey

which greets them on the stairs, when they come home. There are
also poems of his madness, called Chimeres, and very beautiful in

form. You read and admire, and don't understand a line, yet it
seems that if we were a little more or a little less mad we would

understand:
"Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron:

Modulant tour e tour sur la lyre d'Orphee
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee."

Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet
called -

"El Desdichado."
I am that dark, that disinherited,

That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine,
The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled;

A black sun on my lute doth yet remain!
Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain,

Within the tomb, among the midnight dead,
Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed,

The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain.
Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been

Or Lusignan or Biron? By a Queen
Caressed within the Mermaid's haunt I lay,

And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream,
And touched on Orpheus' lyre as in a dream,

Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay!
ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN

To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor.
My Dear Dick,--It is very good of you, among your severe studies at

Eton, to write to your Uncle. I am extremely pleased to hear that
your football is appreciated in the highest circles, and shall be

happy to have as good an account of your skill in making Latin
verses.

I am glad you like "She," Mr. Rider Haggard's book which I sent you.
It is "something like," as you say, and I quite agree with you, both

in being in love with the heroine, and in thinking that she preaches