In those formative days the young man was physically slight and almost frail--remote as yet from the massive giant of flashing black eye and dark leonine mane, whose physique enabled him to sustain many a bout with the wine cup and rejoice in pleasures of table, until, his natural powers otherwise unabated, and but sixty-one years of age, he succumbed to an enlarged heart and died at Paris, October 23, 1872. Gautier, like many another man of letters, presents some contradictions of temperament and production, but for the most part his work is infused with his own strong individuality. Like Loti, he knew the life of many lands and wrote sympathetically of Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and the alluring East. A painter turned art critic and journalist--and so indefatigable a journalist that he himself has estimated that it would require three hundred volumes to compass his collected writings--he pursued a painter’s methods in his literary work. A poet of charm and attainment, and a dramatic critic of secure place, he informed both verse and criticism with the melodious spirit which issued from his love for music. In faithful description the precursor of the realists, he still adhered to his romanticist ideals. Word-connoisseur, and stylist of the first order, he loved perfection of literary form because such harmonies were the outward limbs of beauty. Here was an aggressive, positive, individual man, strong in love as in loathing, tender to all animals, living, like Balzac, joyously a life of struggle against debt, and at last winning a place greater than the forbidden seat in the Academy--a place among the most distinguished romanticists that France ever gave to the world. Gautier’s worship of beauty is not easy to formulate. M. de Sumichrast has termed it “not immoral, but unmoral.” The presence or the absence of virtue or of vice made no difference to him if only the person were beautiful. He no more demanded moral qualities in his characters than he did in the lovely lines of a hill crest. Beauty was the final flame for the adoration of this sensuous acolyte. In all life, at home and widely journeying abroad, he sought it, and when he found it, whether in human form, in relics of ancient art, in modern picture and marble, or in the unrivalled symmetry of nature, his whole being throbbed with delight. As a youth he fell in love with the robust, fleshy women that Rubens had painted for the Louvre, and straightway pilgrimaged to Belgium to find the originals. His experiences were laughable--perhaps a trifle pathetic. The one slattern whose generous bulk met his Rubenic ideals was scrubbing. But out of this boyish episode grew that exquisite tale, “The Fleece of Gold”--a modern covering which, unlike Jason’s, was a woman’s wealth of blonde hair.