Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the _Emaux et Camees_. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of its beauty--beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even be recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism. These--Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier--are the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was also a _via lactea_, from which a well-directed glass can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the _Vie, Poesies et Pensees de Joseph Delorme_; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the _Consolations_ and the _Pensees d'Aout_; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the _Iambes_, lover of Italian art and nature in _Il Pianto_; Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his _Marie_, of Breton wilds and provincial works and ways; Gerard de Nerval, Hegesippe Moreau, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms. VII