"Admitting for the moment," he writes, "the hypothesis of a constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and terrible danger, must be thought of,--that of habit. He who has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon not be able to think without the poison. Imagine the horrible fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work without the aid of hashish or opium.... But man is not so deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he is obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating caresses and the love of houris. What is a paradise that one purchases at the expense of one's own soul?... Unfortunate wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a supernatural existence. Magic dupes them, and lights for them a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our use a garden of true beauty. Confiding in the words that 'faith will remove mountains,' we have accomplished the one miracle for which God has given us license." The perfect art-form of Baudelaire's poems makes translation of them indeed a literal impossibility. The 'Little Old Women,' 'The Voyage,' 'The Voyage to Cytherea,' 'A Red-haired Beggar-girl,' 'The Seven Old Men,' and sonnet after sonnet in 'Spleen and Ideal,' seem to rise only more and more ineffable from every attempt to filter them through another language, or through another mind than that of their original, and, it would seem, one possible creator. [Illustration: Manuscript signature here: Grace King] MEDITATION Be pitiful, my sorrow--be thou still: For night thy thirst was--lo, it falleth down, Slowly darkening it veils the town, Bringing its peace to some, to some its ill. While the dull herd in its mad career Under the pitiless scourge, the lash of unclean desire, Goes culling remorse with fingers that never tire:-- My sorrow,--thy hand! Come, sit thou by me here. Here, far from them all. From heaven's high balconies See! in their threadbare robes the dead years cast their eyes: And from the depths below regret's wan smiles appear. The sun, about to set, under the arch sinks low, Trailing its weltering pall far through the East aglow. Hark, dear one, hark! Sweet night's approach is near. Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.' THE DEATH OF THE POOR