In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er; That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate By woman's tooth and talon: ah! no more Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate! It is a ruin where the jackals rest, And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay! --A perfume swims about your naked breast, Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way! With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!" We can recall nothing like it in the literary history of our own country; the sensation caused by the appearance of the first series of Mr. Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_ was mild in comparison; just as Mr. Swinburne's poems were but wan derivatives from Baudelaire--at least as far as ideas are concerned; I say nothing about their beauty of expression or almost absolute mastery of technique--for it is quite obvious that the English poet was indebted to Baudelaire for all the bizarre and Satanic elements in his work; as Baudelaire was indebted to Poe. Mr. Swinburne, however, is wild where Baudelaire is grave; and where Baudelaire compresses some perverse and morbid image into a single unforgettable line, Mr. Swinburne beats it into a froth of many musical lovely words, until we forget the deep sea in the shining foam. If we call to mind the reception at first given to the black-and-white work of Aubrey Beardsley, it will give some idea of the consternation caused in France by the appearance of the _Flowers of Evil_. Beardsley, indeed, resembles Baudelaire in many ways, for he achieved in art what the other achieved in literature: the apotheosis of the horrible and grotesque, the perfecting of symbols to shadow forth intellectual sin, the tearing away of the decent veil of forgetfulness that hides our own corruption from our eyes, and his one prose romance, _Under the Hill_, unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of twenty-four, beats Baudelaire on his own ground. The four or five chapters which alone remain of this incomplete romance stand alone in literature. They are the absolute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less successfully attempted--a testament of sin. Not the sin of the flesh, the gross faults of the body that are vulgarly known as sin; but sin which is a metaphysical corruption, a depravity of pure intellect, the sin of the fallen angels in hell who cover their anguish with the sound of harps and sweet odours; who are incapable of bodily impurity, and for whom spiritual purity is the only terror. And since mortality, which is the shadow of the immortal, can comprehend spiritual and abstract things only by the analogies and correspondences which exist between them and the far reflections of them that we call reality, both Baudelaire and Beardsley, as indeed all artists who speak with tongues of spiritual truth, choose more or less actual human beings to be the shadows of the