Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/65

nobody who has passed the lower degrees in it, could be of that mind. On the other hand, that Mérimée himself was, as the phrase goes, "head over ears" is pretty clear. Some at least of the letters are among the most perfect love letters with which, in a pretty considerable acquaintance with the class of literature designated and so often misdesignated by that name, I have ever been able to acquaint myself. They are not, of course, extravagant, or lackadaisical; they have nothing of the stale pot-pourri odour about them, which seems to be so successful in sham collections of the kind, and which is perhaps not unknown in real ones. The spirit of them is passion, not sentiment, and long afterward, when (one does not quite know how) the passion has apparently subsided, the vestiges of the old flame flash and glow through the chit-chat and the commonplaces of age, nay, under the very shadow and chill of the wings of the Angel of Death. There is not the slightest reason to suppose or to suspect what is so often more than suspected in epistolary literature, that the writer, if not exactly writing for publication, is, let us say, taking care that his or her letters shall not be absolutely unprepared for that experience, if it should come. On the contrary, it is probable, or rather certain, that the bare idea