of a day. Had I looked to my feet, I might perhaps have seen some fair Magdalene, with her box of odors and her sweeping hair. I passed along with my arms raised towards the heavens, desiring to pluck the stars which fled from me, and disdaining to pick up the little Easter daisy that was opening her golden heart to me in the dewy grass. I have made a great mistake: I have asked from love something more than love, and that it could not give. I forgot that love was naked; I did not understand the meaning of this grand symbol. I have asked from it robes of brocade, feathers, diamonds, sublimity of soul, knowledge, poetry, beauty, youth, supreme power-everything that is „not itself. Love can offer itself alone, and he who would obtain from it aught else is not worthy to be loved.
“I have without doubt hastened too much: my hour has not come; God, who has lent me life, will not take it back from me before I have lived. To what end give a lyre without strings to a poet, or a life without love to a man? God could not do such an inconsistent thing; and no doubt He will, at His chosen time, place in my path her whom I am to love, and by whom I am to be loved. But why has love come to me before the mistress? Why am I thirsty, yet without the spring at which to quench my thirst? or why can I not fly like the birds of the desert to the spot where there is water? The world is to me a Sahara without wells or date-trees. I have not a single shady nook in my life where I can screen myself from the sun: I endure all the fervor of passion without its raptures and unspeakable delights; I know its torments, and am without its pleasures. I am jealous of what does not exist; I am disquieted by the shadow of a shadow; I heave sighs which have no motive; I suffer sleeplessness which no worshipped phantom comes to adorn; I shed tears which flow to the ground without being dried; I give to the winds kisses which are not returned; I wear out my eyes trying to grasp in the distance an uncertain and deceitful form; I wait for what is not to come, and I count the hours anxiously, as though I had an appointment to keep.
“Whoever thou art, angel or demon, maid or courtesan, shepherdess or princess, whether thou comest from the north or from the south, thou whom I know not, and whom I love! oh! force me not to wait longer for thee, or the flame will consume the altar, and thou wilt find in the place of my heart but a heap of cold ashes. Descend from the sphere where thou art; leave the crystal skies, consoling spirit, and come thou to cast the shadow of thy mighty wings upon my soul. Come thou, woman whom I will love, that I may close about thee the arms that have been open for so long. Let the golden doors of the palace wherein she dwells turn on their hinges; let the humble latch of her cottage rise; let the branches in the woods and the briars of the wayside untwine themselves; let the enchantments of the turret and the spells of the magicians be broken; let the ranks of the crowd be opened up to suffer her to pass through.
“If thou comest too late, O my ideal! I shall not have the power left to love thee. My soul is like a dovecote full of doves. At every hour of the day there flies forth some desire. The doves return to the cote, but desires return not to the heart. The azure of the sky becomes white with their countless swarms; they pass away, through space, from world to world, from clime to clime, in quest of some love where they may perch and pass the night: hasten thy step, O my dream! or thou wilt find in the empty nest but the shells of the birds that have flown away.
“My friend, companion of my childhood, to you alone could I relate such things as these. Write to me that you pity me, and that you do not reckon me as a hypochondriac; afford me comfort, for never did I need it more: how enviable are those who have a passion which they can satisfy! The drunkard never encounters cruelty in his bottle. He falls from the tavern into the kennel, and is more happy on his heap of filth than a king upon his throne. The sensualist goes to courtesans for facile amours or shameless refinements. A painted cheek, a short petticoat, a naked breast, a licentious speech, and he is happy; his eye grows white, his lip is wet; he attains the last degree of his happiness, he feels the rapture of his course voluptuousness. The gamester has need but of a green cloth and a pack of greasy and worn-out cards to obtain the keen pangs, nervous spasms, and diabolical enjoyments of his horrible passion. Such people as these may be sated or amused; but that is impossible for me.
“This idea has so taken possession of me that I no longer love the arts, and poetry has no longer any charm for me. What formerly transported me, makes not the least impression on me.
“I begin to believe that I am in the wrong, and that I am asking more from nature and society than they can give. What I seek has no existence, and I ought not to complain for having failed to find it. Yet if the woman of our dreams is impossible to the conditions of human nature, what is it that causes us to love her only and none other, since we are men, and our instincts should be an infallible guide? Who has given us the idea of this imaginary woman? From what clay have we formed this invisible statue? Whence took we the feathers that we have placed on the back of this chimera? What mystic bird placed unnoted in some dark corner of our soul the egg from which there has come forth our dream? What is this abstract beauty which we feel but cannot define? Why, in the presence of some woman who is often charming, do we sometimes say that she is beautiful, while we think her very ugly?
“Where is the model, the type, the inward pattern which affords us the standard of comparison? — for beauty is not an absolute idea, and it can be estimated only by contrast. Have we seen it in the skies, — in a star, — at a ball, under a mother's shadow, the fresh bud of a leafless rose? Was it in Italy or in Spain? Was it here or was it there, yesterday or a long time ago? Was it the worshipped courtesan, the fashionable singer, the prince's daughter? A proud and noble head bending beneath a weighty diadem of pearls and rubies? A young and childish face stooping among the nasturtiums and bindweeds at the window? To what school belonged that picture in which this beauty stood out white and radiant amid the dark shadows? Was it Raphael who caressed the outline that pleases you? Was it Cleomenes who polished the marble that you adore? Are you in love with a Madonna or a Diana? Is your ideal an angel, a sylphid, or a woman?
“Alas! it is something of all this, and yet it is not this.
“Such transparency of tone, such freshness so charming and full of splendor, such flesh wherein runs so much blood and life, such beautiful flaxen hair spreading itself like a mantle of gold, such sparkling smiles and such amorous dimples, such shapes undulating like flames, such force and such suppleness, such satin gloss and such rich lines, such plump arms and such fleshy and polished backs — all this exquisite health belongs to Rubens. Raphael alone could fill lineaments so chaste with that pale amber color. What other, save he, curved those long eye-brows so delicate and so black, and spread the fringes of those eyelashes so modestly cast down? Do you think that Allegri goes for nothing in your ideal? It is from him that the lady of your thoughts has stolen the dull, warm whiteness that enraptures you. She has stood for long before his canvases to surprise the secret of that angelic and ever full-blown smile; she has modelled the oval of her face on the oval of a nymph or a saint. That line of the hip which winds so voluptuously belongs to the sleeping Antiope. Those plump, delicate hands might be claimed by Danae or Magdalene.
“Dusty antiquity itself has provided many of the materials for the composition of your young chimera. Those strong and supple loins around which you twine your arms with so much passion were sculptured by Praxiteles. That divinity has purposely suffered the tip of her charming little foot to pass through the ashes of Herculaneum that your idol may not be lame. Nature has also contributed her share. Here and there in the prism of desire you have seen a beautiful eye beneath a window-blind, an ivory brow pressed against a pane, a smiling mouth behind a fan. From a hand you have divined the arm, and from an ankle, the knee. What you saw was perfect; you supposed the rest to be like what you saw, and you completed it with portions of other beauties obtained elsewhere.
“Even the ideal beauty realized by the painters did not satisfy you, and you have sought from the poets more rounded curves, more ethereal forms, more divine charms, and more exquisite refinements. You have besought them to give breath and speech to your phantom, all their love, all their musing, all their joy and sadness, their melancholy and their morbidness, all their memories and all their hopes, their knowledge and their passions, their spirit and their heart. All this you have taken from them, and to crown the impossible you have added your own passion, your own spirit, your own dream, and your own thought. The star has lent its ray, the flower its fragrance, the palette its color, the poet his harmony, the marble its form, and you your desire.
“How could a real woman, eating and drinking, getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, however adorable and full of charm she might otherwise be, compare with a creature such as this? It could not reasonably be expected, and yet it is expected and sought. What strange blindness! It is sublime or absurd. How I pity and how I admire those who pursue their dream in the teeth of all reality, and die content if they have but once kissed the lips of their chimera! But what a fearful fate is that of a Columbus who has failed to discover his world, and of a lover who has not found his mistress!
“Ah! if I were a poet my songs should be consecrated to those whose lives have been failures; whose arrows have missed the mark, who have died without speaking the word they had to utter and without pressing the hand that was destined for them; to all that has proved abortive and to all that has passed unnoticed, to the stifled fire, to the barren genius, to the. unknown pearl in the depths of the sea, to all that has loved without return, and to all that has suffered with pity from none. It would be a noble task.
“Plato was right in wishing to banish you from his republic, O ye poets! for what evil have you wrought upon
