‘Descendre par l’étroite, l’horizontale porte, Où l’on passe étendu, voilé, silencieux; Ne plus jamais vous voir, Ô Lumière des cieux! Hélas! je n’étais pas faite pour être morte.’ These verses, and many others no less beautiful--for one of the characteristics of Madame de Noailles is her abundance--could leave no doubt on my mind of the quality of the poetess, and I remember writing, when her second book appeared:-- ‘There are four lyric poets--there are at least four lyric poets--writing to-day in France. If we glance over the land in a sort of bird’s eye view, we see, down by the river, like a faun in the reeds and rushes, M. Francis Jammes piping on his Pan’s pipe a sweet irregular and broken music. His is an elfin spirit, familiar with green things and shy wild animal life; his patrons are St Francis and Ariel. Where the bee sucks, there lurks he; and yet he is not wholly natural. Something quaint, furtive, and precious in his style reminds us of a constant artifice in his simplicity. ‘Let us now lift our gaze towards the busier haunts of men; there, in an inspired attitude, stands M. Fernand Gregh, his hand lifted towards the visionary lyre of Victor Hugo, which, like the dagger of Macbeth, hovers before him, just out of reach; yet, though he never wholly grasps it, sometimes the poet snatches a fine strain of music from the strings. A little higher, among the ruins of antiquity, meditates in music M. Henri de Régnier. But who is this who rushes past (her eye in a fine frenzy rolling), singing in an incoherent passion of delight, like the wild shepherdess--_La Ravie de l’Amour de Dieu_--in the Queen of Navarre’s delightful pastoral, soaring sunwards in a corybantic ecstasy--who is this lyric muse, half siren and half bird? “And all a wonder and a wild desire.”’ (In those days I had not read the odes of M. Paul Claudel. And, after all, can one call a poet ‘lyric,’ if he choose to write his rhapsodies in prose?) A year or two later, our poetess gave us, one after the other, three books in prose--a strange beautiful Oriental prose, charged with colour as the draperies of a Russian ballet, full of a crude barbarian charm. First she produced (I think her best prose book) _La Nouvelle Espérance_.