The day was one of fading autumn sunshine. A young Frenchman mounted the steps of a house in a Paris suburb and touched the knocker. His dress was one of conscious affectation, that of a dandy of the Restoration; he was eighteen years old, and his elbow was crooked around a thin manuscript. A kindly neighbor in his country home had secured for him an invitation to meet Saint-Beuve, the great literary critic, and read some poetry to him. Saint-Beuve's library was soon vibrating to the warm emotional tone with which a young man reads poetry, particularly when the poetry happens to be his own. The great critic listened with nostalgic enthusiasm to a succession of vibrant and polished stanzas, and when the visitor had departed he turned to his desk and added in PostScript to a letter "There is among us a boy full of genius."

In the decades that followed, through a series of adventures not always glorious, the young poet confirmed the first impression of Saint-Beuve. He wrote the loviest of romantic poems, and the most delightful parodies of romantic poems. He produced a series of plays which, with appropriate subservience to tradition, were recognized as masterpieces, after his death. He ran off to Venice with a lady older than himself, named George Sand, who eventually wearied of the inevitable struggle between two geniuses who happen also to be lovers, and eloped with an Italian doctor.

The poet returned forlornly to Paris, and spent the rest of his days between the theatre and the cafe. He belonged to the generation which had been born under the shadow of Napoleon, and he felt deeply the sickness of that century which seemed like a long anticlimax to the Napoleonic wars. A later generation, drawing a similar bitterness from a world in greater ruin, can find its mood already mirrored in the pages of his confessions and in his melancholy poems. The Vagabond will journey to Emerson 211 this morning and listen to a more critical estimate of Alfred de Musset from Professor Morize.

TODAY

10 o'clock

"Wordsworth," Professor Lowes, Sever 11.

"Hoccleve and Lydgate," Professor K. G. T. Webster, Sever 18.

"The South; Lanier," Professor Matthiessen, Harvard 6.

"Alfred de Musset," Professor Morize, Emerson 211.

Songs of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahmes sung by Mr. Joseph Lautner, Music Building.

11 o'clock

"Dramatic Works of Stephen Phillips," Professor J. T. Murray, Harvard 3.

"The Century of Pseudo-Classicism and Baroque Art," Professor Howard, Sever 6.

"Music of Renaissance and Reformation," Professor Davison, Music Building.

12 o'clock