‘Corneille poussive, Et vous, les loups maigres, Par ces bises aigres Quoi donc vous arrive? ‘Dans l’interminable Ennui de la plaine, La neige incertaine Luit comme du sable.’ The _Chevaux de bois_ begins thus: ‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois, Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours, Tournez souvent et tournez toujours, Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’ In a truly charming piece in _Sagesse_ he says: ‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, Si bleu, si calme! Un arbre, par dessus le toit Berce sa palme. ‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit, Doucement tinte. Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit, Chante sa plainte.’ In the passage in _Amour_, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition of similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza in _Pierrot gamin_: ‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbe Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe, C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot. Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse, Le cerneau hors de la cosse, C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’ it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poem _Mains_ point to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling: ‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve, Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130] The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131] of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse). Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view, _Art poétique_, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method: ‘De la musique avant toute chose Et pour cela préfère l’Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’ The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.