This is, it seems, like a Vigny made tender and consenting to the humility of a melancholy quite simple and stripped of scarves. He is not only softened. He is tender, and what passion and sensuality, but so delicate! Tu marchais chaste dans la robe de ton âme, Que le désir suivait comme un faune dompté, Je respirais parmi le soir, ô pureté, Mon rêve enveloppé dans tes voiles de femme. (Tr. 22) A delicate sensuality, which is really the impression his verses should give to conform to his poetics, where he dreams De vers blonds où le sens fluide se délie Comme sous l'eau la chevelure d'Ophélie, De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame, Où la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame, De vers d'une ancienne étoffe exténuée, Impalpable comme le son et la nuée, De vers de soirs d'automne ensorcelant les heures Au rite féminin des syllabes mineures, De vers de soirs d'amours énervés de verveine, Où l'âme sente, exquise, une caresse à peine.... (Tr. 23) But, this poet who would only love nuance, Verlainian nuance, could on some occasions be a violent colorist or a vigorous hewer of marble. This other Samain, older and not less genuine, is revealed in parts of his collection called _Evocations_. It is a Parnassian Samain, but always personal, even in grandiloquence. The two sonnets entitled _Cléopâtre_ have a beauty not only of expression but of ideas; it is neither pure music nor pure plastic art. The poem is complete and alive, a strange, disconcerting marble; yes, a living marble whose life stirs and fertilizes the very desert sands, around the momentarily enamoured Sphinx. Such is this poet: powerfully delicious in the art of making all the bells and all the souls vibrate in harmony. All souls are in love with this "child in robes of state." PIERRE QUILLARD It was in the already far-off and perhaps heroic times of the Art Theatre; we were brought to hear and see _la Fille aux Mains coupées_: To me there remains a most pleasant, complete and perfect memory of a play that truly gave the exquisite and keen sensation of the definitive. That hardly endured an hour; of it remains verses which makes a poem with difficulty forgotten. Pierre Quillard has reunited his early poetic writings under a title which for more than one will be presumptuous: _La Gloire du Verbe_. To dare this, is to be sure of oneself; to have the consciousness of mastery; to affirm, more or less, that coming after Leconte de Lisle and De Heredia, one will not flag in a craft demanding, along with splendor of imagination, a singular sureness of hand. He has not lied; a very skillful setter, he truly glorifies the multiple jewels of the word. He makes the water of pearls smile and the rainbow of decomposed diamonds laugh.