A REPRESENTATIVE FRENCH LYRICS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY EDITED BY GEORGE NEELY HENNING = PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY INTER- MODERN LANGUAGE SERIES GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO LONDON ATLANTA DALLAS COLUMBUS SAN FRANCISCO COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY GEORGE NEELY HENNING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 526.4 The Athenæum Press 11-2-27 PREFACE The object and the field of the present book are indicated by its title. Intended to steer a middle course between those anthologies that endeavor to cover the whole vast ground of French lyric poetry and those that confine themselves to two or three authors, it tries to convey, by fairly copious selections, a clear idea of the best work of the really distinguished and really representative poets of the period covered. This period is the nineteenth century, the golden age of lyric poetry. The ten poets of the volume are chosen chiefly on account of their intrinsic merit, partly on account of their position as typical representatives of certain phases of poetry during the century. The exclusion of one or two well-known poets is due to the belief a belief held by many French critics — that their fame is ephemeral, and to the fact that they stand for nothing not better represented by some other poet. The eight thousand six hundred lines of text in this volume the distribution among authors ranging from a minimum of about four hundred lines to a maximum of about eighteen hundred — will, it is thought, suffice to give the student a fairly clear and adequate idea of the genius of the greatest poets of the century, an idea unencumbered by vague memories of brief passages from a host of minor writers. The selection of the poems is based on the reading and rereading of the poetical works of all the authors included. Evident masterpieces, on the one hand, have not been rejected simply because they are to be found in existing anthologies; on the other hand, some hackneyed pieces have been replaced by poems less well-known but |