_Il dort dans l'air glacé, les ailes toutes grandes._ Many readers--particularly those on whom the romantic heresy has laid its hands with the greatest violence--resent this Olympian imperturbability; and the charge has been frequently brought, and is still occasionally repeated, that Leconte de Lisle is lacking in sensibility, that he dares to be "impassible" in an age when every heart is worn, palpitating, on the sleeve of the impulsive lyrist. He was accused, as the idle world always loves to accuse the visionary, of isolating himself from his kind with a muttered _odi profanum vulgus et arceo_. Such an opinion is founded on the aspect of reserve which his vast legendary pictures suggest, and on the impersonal and severely objective attitude which he adopts with regard to history and nature. His poems breathe a disdain of life and of the resilience of human appetite (_La Mort de Valmiki_), a love of solitude (_Le Désert_), a determination to gaze on spectacles of horror without betraying nervous emotion (_Le Massacre de Mona_), which seem superhuman and almost inhuman. He was accused, in his dramas--which were perhaps the most wilful, the least spontaneous part of his work--of affecting a Greek frightfulness which outran the early Greeks themselves. Francisque Sarcey said that Leconte de Lisle, in his tragedy of _Les Erinnyes_, scratched the face of Æschylus, as though he did not find it bloody enough already. The subjects which Leconte de Lisle prefers are never of a sort to promote sentimentality or even sensibility. He writes of Druids moaning along the edge of hyperborean cliffs, of elephants marching in set column across hot brown stretches of sand, of the black panther crouched among the scarlet cactus-blossoms, of the polar bear lamenting among the rocks, of the Syrian sages whose beards drip with myrrh as they sit in council under the fig-tree of Naboth. He writes of humming-birds and of tigers, of Malay pirates and of the sapphire cup of Bhagavat, of immortal Zeus danced round by the young Oceanides, and of Brahma seeking the origin of things in the cascades of the Sacred River. These are not themes which lend themselves to personal effusion, or on which the poet can be expected to embroider any confessions of his egotism. If Leconte de Lisle chooses to be thus remote from common human interests--that is to say, from the emotions of our vulgar life to-day--his is the responsibility, and it is one which he has fully recognized. But that his genius was not wholly marmoreal, nor of an icy impassibility, the careful study of his works will amply assure us.