I still read and spoke of Shelley with a rapture of joy,--he was still my soul. But this craft, fashioned of mother-o'-pearl, with starlight at the helm and moonbeams for sails, suddenly ran on a reef and went down, not out of sight, but out of the agitation of actual life. The reef was Gautier; I read "Mdlle. de Maupin." The reaction was as violent as it was sudden. I was weary of spiritual passion, and this great exaltation of the body above the soul at once conquered and led me captive; this plain scorn of a world as exemplified in lacerated saints and a crucified Redeemer opened up to me illimitable prospects of fresh beliefs, and therefore new joys in things and new revolts against all that had come to form part and parcel of the commonalty of mankind. Till now I had not even remotely suspected that a deification of flesh and fleshly desire was possible, Shelley's teaching had been, while accepting the body, to dream of the soul as a star, and so preserve our ideal; but now suddenly I saw, with delightful clearness and with intoxicating conviction, that by looking without shame and accepting with love the flesh, I might raise it to as high a place within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder gods: not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude,--a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and I cried with my master that the blood that flowed upon Mount Calvary "_ne m'a jamais baigné dans ses flots_." I will not turn to the book to find the exact words of this sublime vindication, for ten years I have not read the Word that has become so inexpressibly a part of me; and shall I not refrain as Mdlle. de Maupin refrained, knowing well that the face of love may not be twice seen? Great was my conversion. None more than I had cherished mystery and dream: my life until now had been but a mist which revealed as each cloud wreathed and went out, the red of some strange flower or some tall peak, blue and snowy and fairylike in lonely moonlight; and now so great was my conversion that the more brutal the outrage offered to my ancient ideal, the rarer and keener was my delight. I read almost without fear: "My dreams were of naked youths riding white horses through mountain passes, there were no clouds in my dreams, or if there were any, they were clouds that had been cut out as if in cardboard with scissors."