Along with the metrical improvements in André Chénier's poetry we have great progress in colouring. Until now poets had preferred the idealistic, sentimental, transcendental expression to the realistically descriptive word. They had written of "The heavens in their wrath;" André wrote, "A black and cloudy sky;" they wrote of "delicate fingers;" André Chénier preferred to say "long, white fingers." And this realistic exactness in certain kinds of description does not exclude another novelty, a sort of chiaroscuro of words and expressions which by their mysterious or enigmatic or fantastic quality suddenly open out wide, unexpected vistas. When we regard this beautiful poetry more from the human than the artistic standpoint, what we miss in it is the expression of personal grief. In spite of its fire and its Frenchness it is too measured, too Attic. The ugly is too systematically excluded; and among ugly and unclean things, the poet has, in genuine Greek fashion, reckoned his own melancholy, his private sufferings and calamities. It is only from some prose memoranda and a few letters that we learn, for instance, how much he suffered from his dependent position in London. He does not give this suffering expression in his poetry. Occasionally at an earlier period he alluded in a roundabout fashion to the irksome restraints imposed on him by his poverty--in such a poem, for instance, as _La Liberté_, an idyll in the style of Theocritus, in which the shepherd breaks his flute and shuns the dance and song of the young maidens, rejecting all consolation because he is a slave.[2] As a fine specimen of André Chénier's writing take _Le Malade_, a poem which, like most of his, is made out of almost nothing, yet which produces an unextinguishable impression. In its composition it reminds one of the third scene in the first act of Racine's _Phèdre_, which seems to have been its far-away model. The mother prays: "Apollon, Dieu sauveur, dieux des savants mystères, Dieu de la vie, et dieu des plantes solitaires, Dieu vainqueur de Python, dieu jeune et triomphant, Prends pitié de mon fils, de mon unique enfant! Prends pitié de sa mère aux larmes condamnée, Qui ne vit que pour lui, qui meurt abandonnée, Qui n'a pas dû rester pour voir mourir son fils; Dieu jeune, viens aider sa jeunesse. Assoupis, Assoupis dans son sein cette fièvre brûlante Qui dévore la fleur de sa vie innocente. Apollon, si jamais, échappé du tombeau, Il retourne au Ménale avoir soin du troupeau, Ces mains, ces vieilles mains orneront ta statue De ma coupe d'onyx à tes pieds suspendue; Et, chaque été nouveau, d'un jeune taureau blanc La hache à ton autel fera couler le sang.