Our roses and our women make us the equals of the gods, and even envied by them. All his criticism, not of one or two ideas alone, but of the history of philosophy, the history of woman, the history of man and the history of religion, is made with a mastery so absolute as to dare to be playful. The winter night was changed to a spring morning as the god walked in the Luxembourg, and the wintry cold of nineteenth-century science melts in the warmth of a spring-time no less magical. The book might be grim. It is clear-eyed and sparkling with dew, like a sonnet by Ronsard. "Comme on voit sur une branche au mois de mai la rose," so one sees the philosophy of M. de Gourmont, not quarried stone, but a flower, so light, so delicate, as to make us forget the worlds that have been overthrown in its manufacture. I remember near the end of _The Pilgrim's Progress_ there is a passage of dancing. Giant Despair has been killed, and Doubting Castle demolished. The pilgrims were "very jocund and merry." "Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but I promise you he footed it well; also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely." Just so, in this book, on a journey no less perilous among ideas, there is an atmosphere of genial entertainment, a delight in the things of the senses illumined by a delight in the things of the mind. And in this there is no irreverence. Only those who have ceased to believe have forgotten how to dance in the presence of their God. Perhaps the technician alone will observe the skill with which M. de Gourmont has handled the most difficult of literary forms. In translating a book one becomes fairly intimate with it, and not the least pleasure of my intimacy with _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_ has been to notice the ease and the grace with which its author turns, always at the right moment, from ideas to images, from romance to thought. "The exercise of thought is a game," he says, "but this game must be free and harmonious." And the outward impression given by this subtly constructed book is that of an intellect playing harmoniously with itself in a state of joyful liberty. M. de Gourmont is a master of his moods, knowing how to serve them; and no less admirable than the loftiest moment of the discussion, is the Callot-like grotesque of the three goddesses, seen not as divinities but as sins, or the Virgilian breakfast under the trees.