For so much in these studies in sensations are the product of a man who has both made and marred his prose and poetical vintage. He analyses some of his hideous pains; and I cannot but believe--I quote these words from a letter I have received from a man of sensitive nerves--that he may have felt: "It _is_ so beautifül to emerge after the bad days that one is almost glad to have been through them, and I can quite truthfully say I am glad to have pain--it makes one a connoisseur in sensations, and we only call it pain because it is something that we don't understand." Without having suffered intensely no poet can be a real poet; and without passion no poet is supreme. And these lines of Shelley are not only meant for himself, but for most of us who are artists: "One who was as a nerve over which do creep The else unfelt oppressions of this earth." There is also something Browning says of Shelley which might be applied to Baudelaire's later years: "The body, enduring tortures, refusing to give repose to the bewildered soul, and the laudanum bottle making but a perilous and pitiful truce between these two." He was also subject to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations, through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and excess of passion animating the creations of the imagination. II How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such words might have compelled the heaven into the earth.