If I were forced to select a single literature and to read nothing
else, I would take the English. In one of the most important departments,
the only one which cannot be re-produced by translation--poetry--you
beat us hollow. We are great only in the drama, and even there you are
perhaps our superiors. We have no short poems comparable to the "Allegro"
or to the "Penseroso," or to the "Country Churchyard."'
'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that he did not think that he could
now read Lamartine.'
'Tocqueville,' said Ampere, 'could taste, like every man of genius, the
very finest poetry, but he was not a lover of poetry. He could not read a
hundred bad lines and think himself repaid by finding mixed with them ten
good ones.'
'Ingres,' said Beaumont, 'perhaps our greatest living painter, is one of
the clever cultivated men who do not read. Somebody put the "Misanthrope"
into his hands, "It is wonderfully clever," he said, when he returned it;
"how odd it is that it should be so totally unknown."'
'Let us read it to-night,' I said.
'By all means,' said Madame de Tocqueville; 'though we know it by heart
it will be new when read by M.
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