Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/447

Rh there is not wanting in these pretty trifles some of the pure gold of poetry, though it be drawn into the thinnest wire. It was only to be regretted that the then youthful composer had read, in addition to a French translation of the works of Shakespeare, also a version of Byron's poems, and was thereby led into affecting in the costume of the spleeny lord that satiety and weariness of life which it was the fashion of French youth to assume. The rosiest little boys, the healthiest saucy striplings, declared in those days that their sense of enjoyment was quite blunted ; they feigned the coldness of old age, and affected a distrait and yawning expression.

Since which time our poor Monsieur de Musset has seen the error of his ways and returned from them, and now plays no more the part of Used-up in his poems ; but, alack, those poems now contain, instead of simulated ruin, the far more inconsolable traces of a real decline of bodily and mental power. Ah, this writer reminds me of those artificial ruins which we see in castle-gardens of the eighteenth century, which were