The book called _Pages_ can naturally be compared with the _Poèmes en Prose_ of Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are now reprinted in _Vers et Prose_, and they strike me as the most distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M. Mallarmé. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets. _La Pipe_, in which the sight of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary lodgings there; _Le Nénuphar Blanc_, recording the vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat; _Frisson d'Hiver_, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china; each of these, and several more of these exquisite _Pages_, give just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems that style should give. They are exquisite--so far as they go--pure, distinguished, ingenious; and the fantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect accord with their general character. Here is a fragment of _La Pénultième_, on which the reader may try his skill in comprehending the New French: "Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable Pénultième." As a translator, all the world must commend M. Mallarmé. He has put the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the strange charm of _Ulalume_, of _The Sleeper_, or of _The Raven_. It is rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a symbolist and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded the translator.