Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/476

466 petty nationalism with visions of the boundless immensity which enwraps this little earth. He helped to make the French prose of his day more clear and a mirror of the soul. And all this he accomplished by a work of which we have only disconnected fragments, and by a life tragic in its brevity, in its physical suffering, extraordinary by its mental torture and intellectual vigor, the life of an all-embracing genius such as the world produces scarcely once in many centuries.