pictures, the books, that satisfy his sense of the exquisitely abnormal. He delights in the Latin of Apuleius and Petronius, in the French of Baudelaire, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers; in the pictures of Gustave Moreau, of Odilon Redon. He delights in the beauty of strange, unnatural flowers, in the melodic combination of scents, in the imagined harmonies of the sense of taste. And at last, exhausted by these spiritual and sensory debauches in the delights of the artificial, he is left (as we close the book) with a brief, doubtful choice before him--madness or death, or else a return to nature, to the normal life. Since _À Rebours_, Huysmans has written one other remarkable book, _Là-Bas_, a study in the hysteria and mystical corruption of contemporary Black Magic. But it is on that one exceptional achievement, _À Rebours_, that his fame will rest; it is there that he has expressed not merely himself, but an epoch. And he has done so in a style which carries the modern experiments upon language to their furthest development. Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, it has sought for novelty, _l'image peinte_, the exactitude of color, the forcible precision of epithet, wherever words, images, or epithets are to be found. Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is--especially in regard to things seen--extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work--so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial--comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature. THE ROSSETTIS William Michael Rossetti, who has just died, survived his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by thirty-seven years, dying at the age of eighty-nine. Not really a man of letters, in the essential sense, his verse, as Gabriel said, "Always going back on the old track," he had a certain talent of his own; for he edited an excellent edition of Blake's Poems, and a creditable edition of Shelley, the first critical edition of his poems. He was the first Englishman who ever dared to print a Selection from Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_,--in 1868; and, in spite of having to exclude such passages as he considered indecent, the whole book was a valuable contribution to our literature.