The poem might form the subject of a drama or a musical cantata.

The lamentations of Marguerite on her blindness remind one of Milton's heart-rending words on the same subject: "For others, day and joy and light, For me, all darkness, always night."{4} Sainte-Beuve, in criticising Jasmin's poems, says that "It was in 1835 that his talent raised itself to the eminence of writing one of his purest compositions--natural, touching and disinterested--his Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille, in which he makes us assist in a fete, amidst the joys of the villagers; and at the grief of a young girl, a fiancee whom a severe attack of smallpox had deprived of her eyesight, and whom her betrothed lover had abandoned to marry another.
"The grief of the poor abandoned girl, her changes of colour, her attitude, her conversation, her projects--the whole surrounded by the freshness of spring and the laughing brightness of the season--exhibits a character of nature and of truth which very few poets have been able to attain.

One is quite surprised, on reading this simple picture, to be involuntarily carried back to the most expressive poems of the ancient Greeks--to Theocritus for example--for the Marguerite of Jasmin may be compared with the Simetha of the Greek poet.

This is true poetry, rich from the same sources, and gilded with the same imagery.

In his new compositions Jasmin has followed his own bias; this man, who had few books, but meditated deeply in his heart and his love of nature; and he followed the way of true art with secret and persevering labour in what appeared to him the most eloquent, easy, and happy manner...
"His language," Sainte-Beuve continues, "is always the most natural, faithful, transparent, truthful, eloquent, and sober; never forget this last characteristic.