our author. Its scene is where it should be, in Paris, and the actors are a man and a woman walking at night. He speaks:
Dear, had the world, in its caprice.
Deigned to proclaim, "I know you both;
Have recognized your plighted troth;
Am sponsor for you; live in peace,"—
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, which speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world and what it fears.
How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women, models of their sex,
Society's true ornament—
Ere we dared wander nights like this,
Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again,
To warmth, and light, and bliss.
Ah! Paris! The Seine! The Boulevard! In little, they are anywhere, and the spirit of revolution did not die in '48. What is "Fifine at the Fair," with its motto from "Don Juan," but an apologia for this same revolt of passion against social rules, social fetters? "Frenetic to be free"—those are the words from it which concentrate its meaning. But how consort this freedom with the just claims of an Elvira, immaculate spouse? How answer her question, why
My husband prefers to me—chaste, temperate, serene—
What sputters green and blue, this fizgig, called Fifine?
Whether the poet's answer will please most as well as it seemed to his Elvira, I much misdoubt. Lips shaped by pronouncing the prunes and prisms of society's parlance will scarcely open to a hearty pardon for such delinquents. But the poet, perhaps, had in mind the wider spirit of his own life-partner, of her who acknowledges to
The stag-like heart awake.
Which the pale was low for keeping
In the road it ought to take;
