Page:Poet Lore, volume 1, 1889.djvu/21

Rh 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:

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

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