which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes: "Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx, L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore, Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore, (Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.) Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or Agonise selon peut-être le décor Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe, Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe De scintillations sitôt le septuor." Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in sleeplessness--how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets must have had sleepless nights!-- "We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil." He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes: "When her lips and eyes Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small." And, in another line, he writes: "By the moist languor of thy breathing face." Lycius, in _Lamia:_ "Sick to lose The amorous promise of her lone complain, Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;" and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's _The Defence of Guinevere;_ as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines: "Listen, suppose your turn were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak; Yea, laid a dying while very mightily The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well; Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak: 'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!' Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies