Here Verlaine's tormented soul is entirely cast out of himself, and plunges in a sudden flood into the infinite. Ecstasy overcomes the feminine element in him, just as in his life vulgar drunkenness roused his hard, coarse and brutal qualities. For a moment Verlaine is not only a genuine and marvellous, but also a truly strong and creative poet; no longer elegiac and sensitive, but creative. In the reflux of enthusiasm come silent tender hours with songs in which the notes are muffled. They are the poems he wrote in the prison which gave him quietude and shelter, and in the silence of which the soft voices of his childhood rose again. Each one of these poems is noble, simple, and chaste. It is only necessary to name the titles to hear the soft violin note of their mild sadness--"Un grand sommeil noir," "Le ciel, est, par dessus le toit," "Je ne sais pas pourquoi mon esprit amer," "Le son du cor," "Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie." It is truly "_le coeur plus veuf que toutes les veuves_" that speaks in them. When the "_guote suendaere_" again went out into life which he had never been able to master, and the wild restlessness and torment began which tore his heart into tatters, nothing remained of the two years in prison except his pious faith and a sorrowful memory. The four walls which had enclosed him also had protected him. "He was truly himself only in the hospital and in prison," says Huysmans. Poor Lelian's longing plaint is for this silence. "Ah truly, I regret the two years in the tower." His song says "Formerly I dwelt in the best of castles." His yearning for the elemental, "far from a curbed age," never left him since those hours, and least of all in Paris, the city of his crowning fame as a poet. Faith he soon lost, but never the yearning for faith. In addition Verlaine wrote a long series of Catholic poems. As will be shown later, he outraged his unique qualities and thus destroyed them. The unconscious portion, the wonderful fragrance of his early religious poems, which were entirely emotional, soon dissipated. He constructed an infinite number of pious verses, verses for saints' days, religious emblems, and compiled volumes of poetry for Catholic publishers. At the same time he edited pornographica and all manner of indecencies. His conversion had created a sensation. He had been thrust into a rôle and felt it his duty to play the part and to retain the costume. This was the reason for the antithesis. I do not believe the faith of his later years to have been genuine. He has called himself "the ruin of a still Christian philosopher already pagan," and in his obscene books turned the rites of Catholic faith, which he elsewhere glorified, into phallic and other sexual symbols.