Excerpt from The Life of Alfred De Musset Every generation sings for itself and in a lan guage of its own. It has poets of its own to interpret its feelings and aspirations. After ward come other men with other ideas and other passions, almost always quite inconsistent with those of their elders, and the newcomers are un touched by all that seemed, only the day before, to be so thrilling. Their intellectual preoccupa tions are no longer the same; nor their eyes, their ears, their souls. If peradventure they relish the poets of the bygone generation, it is after study and reflection, as if it were a question of writers of a distant time. This, too, is only on the con dition that they find no cause to dread their influ ence. Otherwise they take an aversion to them, because the younger men feel an inward and per haps wholesome need of thinking and feeling in other ways than their predecessors felt and thought. On these terms only do they gain con sciousness of themselves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.