se 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 a 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