Imitation of Browning was by no means a passing mood with me. A year before I tackled my Shelley and Byron poems, I had written a piece of imitation Browningese which is not without its stock of amusement, considering what was to be the fate of the versifier.
JEAN DUVAL'S LAST WORDS
Jean Duval has presented himself at a Paris newspaper office, asking for employment; this being refused him he makes a last request, offering to sell his muse, which he had hoped to keep unhired. This also being refused, his want of bread overcomes him, and he curses the Editor and dies.
A plague on all gold, say I,
I who must win it, or die.
Here goes, I'll sell my Muse.
You may buy her for twenty sous.
No, I'll write by the ream,
Only give me your theme,
And a sou more for a light
To put in my garret at night.
Garret!—ah, I was forgetting,
My present's a very cheap letting
Under the prison wall,
Just where it grows so tall.
Why don't I steal, you say?
Oh, I wasn't brought up that way.
Will you give me the twenty sous?
Come, it isn't much to lose.
You won't? Then I die. Ah, well,
God will find you a lodging in hell.
(Ætat. 14.)
The melancholy which belongs to the young poet, a melancholy which had to be feigned in my case, was reserved for sonnets of a somewhat antinomian type. Here is an example.
SONNET
(1875)
O why so cruel, ye that have left behind
Life's fears, and from draped death have drawn the veil?
Oh, why so cruel? Does life or death avail?
Why tell us not?—why leave us here so blind,
To tread this earth, not sure that we may find
Even an end beyond this worldly pale
Of petty hates and loves so weak and frail?
O why not speak?—is it so great a thing
To cross death's stream and whisper in the ear
Of us weak mortals some faint hope or cheer?
Or tell us, dead ones, if the hopes that spring
From joyous hours when all seems bright and clear
Have any truth. O speak, ye dead, and say
If that in hope of dying, live we may.
(Ætat. 15.)