Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men.

If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_.
The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind.

The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse.

He is the poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success.

In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised.