Music first of all and before all, he insists; and then, not color, but _la nuance_, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be something vague, intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight "toward other skies and other loves." To express the inexpressible he speaks of beautiful eyes behind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm of clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the verse in which he makes this confession of faith has the exquisite troubled beauty--_sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose_--which he commends as the essential quality of verse. In a later poem of poetical counsel he tells us that art should, first of all, be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere: _L'art mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même._ The two poems, with their seven years' interval--an interval which means so much in the life of a man like Verlaine--give us all that there is of theory in the work of the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetical innovators. Verlaine's poetry has varied with his life; always in excess--now furiously sensual, now feverishly devout--he has been constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions. For, with all the violence, turmoil and disorder of a life which is almost the life of a modern Villon, Paul Verlaine has always retained that childlike simplicity, and, in his verse, which has been his confessional, that fine sincerity, of which Villon may be thought to have set the example in literature. Beginning his career as a Parnassian with the _Poèmes Saturniens_, Verlaine becomes himself, in the _Fêtes Galantes_, caprices after Watteau, followed, a year later, by _La Bonne Chanson_, a happy record of too confident a lover's happiness. _Romances sans Paroles_, in which the poetry of Impressionism reaches its very highest point, is more _tourmenté_, goes deeper, becomes more poignantly personal. It is the poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings, and which paints as Whistler paints, seeming to think the colors and outlines upon the canvas, to think them only, and they are there. The mere magic of words--words which evoke pictures, which recall sensations--can go no further; and in his next book, _Sagesse_, published after seven years' wanderings and sufferings, there is a graver manner of more deeply personal confession--that "sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter," which he has defined in a prose criticism on himself as his main preference in regard to style. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter," mark the rest of Verlaine's work, whether the sentiment be that of passionate friendship, as in _Amour_; of love, human and divine, as in _Bonheur_; of the mere lust of the flesh, as in _Parallèlement_ and _Chansons pour Elle._ In his very latest verse the quality of simplicity has become exaggerated, has become, at times, childish; the once