There is a danger--but there is also a fascination--in the instinct which leads us, when we observe literature broadly, to find relations or parallelisms between independent and diverse personalities. In the most striking examples, however, where there has been no actual influence at work, these parallelisms are apt to be very misleading. Where it is impossible not to observe elements of likeness, as between Byron and Musset, we may take them to be actual, and no matters of chance. But the similarity, in certain aspects, between Alfred de Vigny and Thomas Hardy, between André Chénier and Keats, between Crabbe and Verhaeren, must be accidental, and is founded on a comparison between very limited portions of the work of each. Nevertheless, for purposes of illumination, it is sometimes useful--on what we may call the Lamarckian system--to see where the orbits of certain eminent writers of distinctive originality approach nearest to one another. It is admitted that Leconte de Lisle is pre-eminently gifted among the poets of France in certain clearly defined directions. His poems, which are marked by a concinnity of method which sometimes degenerates into monotony, are distinguished above all others by their haughty concentration of effort, by their purity of outline, and by their extreme precision in the use of definite imagery. They aim, with unflinching consistency, at a realization of beauty so abstract that the forms by which it is interpreted to the imagination are almost wholly sculpturesque. Is there an English poet of whom, at his best, the same language might be used? There is one, and only one, and that is Walter Savage Landor. It cannot but be stimulating to the reader to put side by side, let us say, the opening lines of _The Hamadryad_ and of _Khirón_, or the dialogue of _Niobé_ and that of _Thrasymedes and Eunoë_, and to see how closely related is the manner in which the English and the French poet approach their themes. The spirit of pagan beauty broods over _Hypatie et Cyrille_ as it does over the mingled prose and verse of _Pericles and Aspasia_, and with the same religious _desiderium_. We shall not find another revelation of the cupuscular magnificence of the farthermost antiquity so striking as Landor's _Gebir_, unless we seek it in the _Kaïn_ of Leconte de Lisle. But we should not drive this parallel too far. If the breadth and majesty of vision which draw these two poets together are notable, not less so are their divergencies. Landor, who so often appears to be on the point of uttering something magical which never gets past his lips, is one of the most unequal of writers. He ascends and descends, with disconcerting abruptness, from an exquisite inspiration to the darkest level of hardness. Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, is the victim of no vicissitudes of style: he floats in the empyrean, borne up apparently without an effort at a uniform height, like his own Condor: