(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are convertible terms.' The Parnassian precision rested on the postulate that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can be adequately expressed, the analogue of the contemporary scientific conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr. William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does, to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden guardian-god recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.