Within a decade the wave of conservatism had so far receded that Paul Verlaine’s _Les Amies, Scènes d’Amour Sapphique_ (1867), though published in Brussels for safety, apparently encountered in France no harsher judgment than a comment in the _Bulletin Trimestriel_ that they were by a poet of the school of M. Leconte de Lisle, and were “fort singuliers.”[46] The slim sheaf of sixteen pages contained six poems, subsequently included in his volume _Parallèlement_, which described lesbian love and its overt expression more explicitly than Baudelaire’s condemned verses, or indeed than any other non-erotic work up to that time. The “Pensionnaires” are sisters in the middle teens, the younger of whom still ‘smiles with innocence’ despite the elder’s far from innocent ministrations. The pair in “Sur le Balcon,” dreaming only of the love between women, are ‘a strange couple, pitied by other heterosexual couples.’ “Printemps” and “Eté” reproduce the situation in Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées, I” except that here the younger and more innocent girl is neither reluctant nor apprehensive. In “Per Amica Silentia” the poet applies for the first time the adjective “esseulées”—solitary, left alone—to those who ‘in these unhappy times’ are set apart by “le glorieux stigmate,” thus foreshadowing the social isolation lamented sixty years later in the _Well of Loneliness_, but indicating by the adjective “glorieux” that his sentiment, unlike Baudelaire’s, is one of championship. In the final “Sappho” he describes the poet, hollow-eyed, pacing a cold shore, restless as a she-wolf, weeping and tearing her hair over Phaon’s indifference until finally she plunges into the sea in despair at the contrast between her present state and the ‘young glory of her early loves.’[47] It is more than likely that it was from this poem that Rilke derived his interpretation of Sappho’s “Lament” heretofore mentioned. During the preceding year (1866) there had appeared in England Swinburne’s _Poems and Ballads: First Series_, which raised an outcry on several counts—its general “paganism,” its evidence of French influence (particularly that of Baudelaire), and its scattering of poems with a homosexual tinge. Swinburne had, in his youth, been intimate with the much older Sir Richard Burton, famous translator of the _Arabian Nights_ and author of an appendix on that “sotadic zone” in the Mediterranean region which in his opinion favored the development of homosexual tendencies. Later Swinburne fell under the influence of Richard Monckton-Milnes, famous for a library of variant erotica. As both of these friendships were matters of common knowledge, when _Poems and Ballads_ appeared, attention focussed naturally on such poems as “Erotion,” “Hermaphroditus,” “Fragoletta,” “Hesperia,” and the fairly numerous group with a lesbian coloring, though none of these were explicit or described a realistic contemporary situation in the manner of Verlaine.