Baudelaire finds the sublime in the artificial--“like the rouge which enhances the beauty of a handsome woman.” He carries out an insane idea by describing a metallic landscape, with neither water nor vegetation. “All is rigid, polished, shining; without heat and without sun; in the midst of the eternal silence the blue water is enclosed, like the ancient mirrors, in a golden basin.” He finds his ideal in the Latin of the Decadence, “the only tongue which can thoroughly render the language of passion,” and adores cats to such a degree as to address three poems to them. Lenau, in his “Moon of the Hypochondriàc,” sees, contrary to the usual practice of poets, in the cold moon, without water and without atmosphere, “the sexton of the planets, who, with a silver thread entwined, enchains the sleepers and draws them to death; she beckons with her finger, leads sleep-walkers astray, and counsels the thief.” Though, as a young man, he had frequently expressed his opinion that “mysticism is a symptom of insanity,” he often showed mystical tendencies, especially in his later poems. In the Koran, there is not a single chapter which has any connection with another; on the contrary, it often happens that, in the course of a single _sura_, the ideas are interrupted, and follow each other almost at random. “On Mahomet,” writes Morkos, “the most contradictory verdicts may be pronounced, for it is impossible to deny his great excellence, while at the same time there is no disguising the fact that we find in him the most signal artifices of imposture, the grossest ignorance, and the greatest imprudence.” It appears to me, moreover, that the great writers who have been under the dominion of alcohol, have a style peculiar to themselves, whose characteristics are a deliberate eroticism, and an inequality which is rather grotesque than beautiful, owing to too unrestrained fancy, frequent imprecations and abrupt transitions from the deepest melancholy to obscene gaiety, and a marked preference for such subjects as madness, drink, and the gloomiest scenes of death. “Poe,” says Baudelaire, “likes to place his figures against greenish or violet backgrounds, surrounded by the phosphorescence of decay, and the atmosphere of storms and orgies. He throws himself into grotesquery for the love of the grotesque, into horror for the love of the horrible.” The same thing is done by Baudelaire himself, who loves to describe the effects of alcohol or opium. “There are days when my heart faints in me, and the mud overwhelms me,”[448] sang poor Praga, who killed himself with alcohol, and who, singing the praises of wine, blasphemed thus: “Let it come--the reproach of the sober man; come--the contempt of the human race,--come, the hell of the Eternal Father: I will go down into it with my glass in hand.”[449]