It is lamentable to think how many things Baudelaire never did or never finished. One reason might have been his laziness, his sense of luxury, and, above all, his dissatisfaction with certain things he had hoped to do, and which likely enough a combination of poverty and of nerves prevented him from achieving. And as he looks back on the general folly incident to all mankind--his _bête noire_--on his lost opportunities, on his failures, a sack of cobwebs, a pack of gossamers, wave in the air before his vision; and he wonders why he himself has not carved his life as those fanciful things have their own peculiar way of doing. Baudelaire was inspired to begin _Mon cœur mis à nu_ in 1863 by this paragraph he had read in Poe's _Marginalia,_ printed in New York in 1856: "If an ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own--the road to immortal renown lies straight open and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple--a few plain words--_My Heart Laid Bare_." With all his genius, Poe was never able to write a book of Confessions, nor was Baudelaire ever able to finish his. Poe, who also died tragically young, throws out a sinister hint in these last words: "No man _could_ write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen." Baudelaire's Confessions are meant to express his inmost convictions, his most sacred memories, his hates and rages, the manner in which his sensations and emotions have fashioned themselves in his waking self; to express that he is a stranger to the world and to the world's cults; to express, also, as he says, that _ce livre tout rêvé sera un livre de rancunes._ It cannot in any sense be compared with the Confessions of Saint Augustine, of Rousseau, of Cellini, of Casanova. Still, Baudelaire had none of Rousseau's cowardice, none of Cellini's violent exultations over himself and the things he created: none of Casanova's looking back over his past life and his adventures: those of a man who did not live to write, but wrote because he had lived and when he could live no longer. In Baudelaire's notes there is something that reminds me of Browning's lines: "Men's thoughts and loves and hates! Earth is my vineyard, these grew there; From grapes of the ground, I made or marred My vintage."