this vegetable glass of nature!"_ In spite of the cry against _Flowers of Evil_, Baudelaire did not lack defenders among literary men themselves; and many enthusiastic articles were written in praise of his book. Thierry not unjustly compared him to Dante, to which Barbey d'Aurevilly replied, "Baudelaire comes from hell, Dante only went there"; adding at the finish of his article: "After the _Flowers of Evil_ there are only two possible ways for the poet who made them blossom: either to blow out his brains or become a Christian." Baudelaire did neither. And Victor Hugo, after reading the two poems, "The Seven Old Men" and "The Little Old Women," wrote to Baudelaire. "You have dowered the heaven of art with one knows not what deathly gleam," he said in his letter; "you have created a new shudder." The phrase became famous, and for many years after this the creation of a new shudder was the ambition of every young French writer worth his salt. When the first great wave of public astonishment had broken and ebbed, Baudelaire's work began to be appreciated by others than merely literary men, by all in fact who cared for careful art and subtle thinking, and before long he was admitted to be the greatest after Hugo who had written French verse. He was famous and he was unhappy. Neither glory, nor love, nor friendship--and he knew them all--could minister to the disease of that fierce mind, seeking it knew not what and never finding it; seeking it, unhappily, in the strangest excesses. He took opium to quieten his nerves when they trembled, for something to do when they did not, and made immoderate use of hashish to produce visions and heighten his phantasy. His life was a haunted weariness. Thomas de Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ seems to have fascinated him to a great extent, for besides imitating the vices of the author, he wrote, in imitation of his book, _The Artificial Paradises_, a monograph on the effects of opium and hashish, partly original, partly a mere translation from the _Confessions_. He remembered his visions and sensations as an eater of drugs and made literary use of them. At the end of this book, among the "Poems in Prose," will be found one entitled "The Double Chamber," almost certainly written under the influence of opium, and the last verse of "The Temptation"-- "O mystic metamorphosis! My senses into one sense flow-- Her voice makes perfume when she speaks, Her breath is music faint and low!" as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet "Correspondences"-- "Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child, Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green; Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild, Have all the expansion of things infinite: As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin, Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight,"