When "Les Cariatides" was published poets had begun to keep an eye on the Bourse, and artists dabbled in finance. The new volume of song in the sordid age was a November primrose, and not unlike the flower of Spring. There was a singular freshness and hopefulness in the verse, a wonderful "certitude dans l'expression lyrique," as Sainte-Beuve said. The mastery of musical speech and of various forms of song was already to be recognised as the basis and the note of the talent of De Banville. He had style, without which a man may write very nice verses about heaven and hell and other matters, and may please thousands of excellent people, but will write poetry--never. Comparing De Banville's boy's work with the boy's work of Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as in "The Hesperides"--the _timbre_ of a new voice. Poetry so fresh seems to make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now are sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied. It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The melody of Mr. Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his imagination, rose "As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers," when Apollo sang. The architecture was floating at first, and confused; while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where he sat piping to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant with fresh paint and gilding. "The Cariatides" support the pediment and roof of a theatre or temple in the Graeco-French style. The poet proposed to himself "A cote de Venus et du fils de Latone Peindre la fee et la peri." The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, "La Voie Lactee," reminds one of the "Palace of Art," written before the after-thought, before the "white-eyed corpses" were found lurking in corners. Beginning with Homer, "the Ionian father of the rest,"-- "Ce dieu, pere des dieux qu'adore Ionie,"-- the poet glorifies all the chief names of song. There is a long procession of illustrious shadows before Shakespeare comes--Shakespeare, whose genius includes them all. "Toute creation a laquelle on aspire, Tout reve, toute chose, emanent de Shakespeare." His mind has lent colour to the flowers and the sky, to "La fleur qui brode un point sur les manteau des plaines, Les nenuphars penches, et les pales roseaux Qui disent leur chant sombre au murmure des eaux."