"
[Footnote: Epilogue of "Jocelyn."]
The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, toward heaven,
and fills you with divine emotion; which sings of love and death, of
hope and sacrifice, and awakens the sense of the infinite. "Jocelyn"
always stirs in me impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to
me to see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no
parallel in French, for purity, except "Paul et Virginie," and I think
that I prefer "Jocelyn." To be just, one ought to read them side by
side.
_Six o'clock._--One more day is drawing to its close. With the exception
of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have already lost their color. The
evening chill succeeds the heat of the afternoon. The sense of the
implacable flight of things, of the resistless passage of the hours,
seizes upon me afresh and oppresses me.
"Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez!"
In vain we cry with the poet, "O time, suspend thy flight!"... And what
days, after all, would we keep and hold? Not only the happy days, but
the lost days! The first have left at least a memory behind them, the
others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse....
_Eleven o'clock._--A gust of wind. A few clouds in the sky. The
nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the cricket and the river are
still singing.
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