In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision--she is more insatiable than Death--more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured nerves, that she desires nothing--nothing at all. In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols speak--you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man? It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of your soul. Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius. Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: _Je suis devenu Dieu!_ One instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: _Je suis un Dieu!_ One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch has need of a perfect leisure: _Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un parfait loisir"_ He gives his definition of the magic that imposes on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge of hell, testifies of its original grandeur. VIII I In their later work all great poets use foreshortening. They get greater subtlety by what they omit and suggest to the imagination. Browning, in his later period, suggests to the intellect, and to that only. Hence his difficulty, which is not a poetic difficulty; not a cunning simplification of method like Shakespeare's, who gives us no long speeches of undiluted undramatic poetry, but poetry everywhere like life-blood.