Gautier sang to his antique lyre praise of the flesh and contempt of the soul; Baudelaire on a mediaeval organ chaunted his unbelief in goodness and truth and his hatred of life. But Verlaine advances one step further: hate is to him as commonplace as love, unfaith as vulgar as faith. The world is merely a doll to be attired to-day in a modern ball dress, to-morrow in aureoles and stars. The Virgin is a pretty thing, worth a poem, but it would be quite too silly to talk about belief or unbelief; Christ in wood or plaster we have heard too much of, but Christ in painted glass amid crosiers and Latin terminations, is an amusing subject for poetry. And strangely enough, a withdrawing from all commerce with virtue and vice is, it would seem, a licentiousness more curiously subtle and penetrating than any other; and the licentiousness of the verse is equal to that of the emotion; every natural instinct of the language is violated, and the simple music native in French metre is replaced by falsetto notes sharp and intense. The charm is that of an odour of iris exhaled by some ideal tissues, or of a missal in a gold case, a precious relic of the pomp and ritual of an archbishop of Persepolis. Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente Vers la chair de ce garçon vierge que cela tente D'aimer des seins légers et ce gentil babil. Il a vaincu la femme belle au coeur subtil Etalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante; Il a vaincu l'enfer, il rentre dans sa tente Avec un lourd trophée à son bras pueril. Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même, Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel; En robe d'or il adore, gloire et symbole, Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel, Et, o ces voix d'enfants chantent dans la coupole. I know of no more perfect thing than this sonnet. The hiatus in the last line was at first a little trying, but I have learned to love it; not in Baudelaire nor even in Poe is there more beautiful poetry to be found. Poe, unread and ill-understood in America and England, here, thou art an integral part of our artistic life. The Island o' Fay, Silence, Elionore, were the familiar spirits of an apartment beautiful with tapestry and palms; Swinburne and Rossetti were the English poets I read there; and in a golden bondage, I, a unit in the generation they have enslaved, clanked my fetters and trailed my golden chain. I had begun a set of stories in many various metres, to be called "Roses of Midnight." One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to consciousness of reality. CHAPTER V